April 18, 2001

Hard drive maintenance is one of the areas most people don't consider as being important when just the opposite is true. Your hard drive is composed of platters coated with magnetic material. When your computer stores files, it starts writing files in succession.

All hard drives have bad spots on them. When the disk is setup, the bad spots are marked so the computer doesn't try to use those areas when it is saving files and installing program files. As time goes on, more bad spots can develop. The first utility we are going to discuss is Scandisk. Windows XP users please note: Scandisk is no longer located on the menus.  It is still important to run it, though.  To run the equivalent in XP, click here.  Scandisk performs two very important functions. The first is checking the FAT (File Allocation Tables) and directory structures. Skipping the techy stuff, there are two road maps (FAT) to tell the computer where all the files are on the computer hard drive. If the computer locks up or something goes wrong, one of the FAT tables may become corrupt, therefore, the FAT tables may report two files as being in the same place or one file may be reported to be in two different places. Scandisk compares the FAT tables and repairs any problems.

The second function of Scandisk is to check the surface of the disk for bad spots. This is done when the thorough test is checked. This takes a long time but should be done. It will check the surfaces of the disks to make sure they are healthy and if it finds any spots bad or weak they will be marked as such so the computer will not try to write data to them. Run Scandisk once a month.

After running Scandisk you should run Disk Defragmenter. When the computer saves files it fills in all the blank areas so some files will have parts of a file sandwiched in between other files and the remainder of the files in other places. Each time the computer tries to run the program file or open the data file, the hard drive heads have to bounce around finding all the pieces to splice together causing a loss of time and also a lot of extra wear and tear on the drive. Defrag puts all the files back together so everything works smoother. Run Disk Defragmenter once a month.

To find these programs, go to the Start button, click on Programs, Accessories, System Tools, run Scandisk making sure the Automatically fix errors and thorough items are checked. When done, run Defrag.

You can also double click on the Task Scheduler icon in the system tray, or in Control Panel, and add these programs to run automatically at whatever time and day you want. Sometimes, if you run defrag manually, you will notice the program will run for a while, then start over again and do this a lot.  Sometimes, defrag will give a message that it has restarted ten times and do you want to continue. This scenario is usually caused by one of the programs running in the system tray. The easiest fix for this problem is to go to the Start button, and then click on run. Type in msconfig and hit Enter. Go to the Tools menu and click on System configuration utility. Click on Selective Startup and then un-check the Load startup Items check box. You will get a prompt after you click OK which will restart the computer. When it restarts you will get a dialog box saving you are in a diagnostic mode. Click OK, then run defrag. After you're done defragging, go back to the system configuration utility and click on Normal Startup and again, restart the computer.

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