consistency check

Whenever I restart, I get a pale blue screen from Windows saying my D drive needs to be checked for "consistency." This is a 20 gig FAT32 drive, and was brought over from my old computer when I got my new Sony VAIO. (60 gig HD with 1g RAM). The drive carries about 17 gigs worth of graphics files.

When I enable the checking it goes very slowly --- 26 percent complete after 12 hours.

I would like to be able to pause this process. Otherwise, I have to restart again and disable it.

In the best of worlds, I would like to eliminate the bluescreen altogether.

Anybody run into this?

 

If the checking is going that slowly, it is probably doing repairs. Although that seems slow for a drive that size unless there are major issues.

If you have a time when you can do without the PC for a while, I'd do a full check/repair including free space of all drives though.

start~run~cmd and then

chdksk D: /r and if it says the process can't be done at that time, just say yes to doing it at next boot. Then boot and let it run.

Then the same for C: and any other hard drives you have. C: for sure will require a boot.

And for what it's worth, the longest I've seen this process take was 3 days but the drive was quite a bit larger than yours. But it did complete and things did work fine (without any annoying messages) after it was done.

If the damage/problems are minor, I'd expect a 20Gb to complete in a few hours. But you can't go by the percentage because of the way the checking is done. It could hang for half hour on 26% and then proceed quickly to 65% and seem to stall again because it's run into another problem area or has lots of work to do at a certain stage.

Do give yourself the quickest possible check though by getting rid of any trash files (temp stuff) before you start. Also it will go quicker if you have at least 20% free space on the drive so maybe worth moving some files off the drive before you do the check.

 

consistency and gratitude

Thanks very much, Newt. A very considerate and detailed reply. I'll try disk check and stuff before I go to bed.
Thanks again.

 

And another thing...

The old 20 gig drive is FAT32 and the rest are NTFS. So I've been thinking of just moving the stuff on D over to the new E drive, which is 60 gigs. Is there a Windows XP facility for doing that, or do you need more software?

 

Depends entirely on what "stuff" you are moving.

If data or similar files (documents, picures, etc.) it's simple enough.

If you are talking installed apps from one to the other, it can either be harder or impossible.

So, details please.

 

consistency problem

This would just be the graphics files. The D drive is where I keep all my JPEGs and a few TIFFs. I think there are five or six graphics program files there, Photoshop, Breezebrowser, Vuescan, Nikonscan and a file organizing program. These could easily be uninstalled and reinstalled elsewhere. It's got about 17 gigs worth of data files in there, which I call stuff in an affectionate way.