Dual Boot Disk Tools Question

have 2 hard drives. C has win98 installed and D has XP Pro (dual Boot). Should I run the disktools from XP to check for errors and defrag drive C or should that be done while booted into 98? Thanks.

 

Excellent question Tarkus and I'm sitting here thinking I really should know the answer but I don't. I'll be very interested in it myself.

 

If both file systems are FAT32, I'd favor running SCANDISK under Win98 as opposed to CHKDSK in XP. SCANDISK is safer since it has the option of allowing you to revert any changes it makes.

If XP is using the NTFS file system, it's a moot point since Win98 won't be able to see the NTFS files and XP can't run SCANDISK. In that case, I'd go with using both SCANDISK and CHKDSK, each to it's own system.

Of course running XP's CHKDSK on both drives would work, it just doesn't provide all the safety that you can have using SCANDISK on the FAT32 drive.

On rare occasions, I have known CHKDSK to make changes that rendered the drive unbootable. If that happens with SCANDISK, you can boot to a DOS session and revert the changes. With CHKDSK on a NTFS file system drive, you are hard pressed to recover if it hoses your boot drive.