Can I “pause” chkdsk by hibernating the computer?

Question

So I have a situation and I need to figure out what to do about it before Hurricane Irene hits Saturday evening. I mentioned in another question that I'm running (the GUI equivalent of) chkdsk /r on a secondary hard disk drive (that I pulled out of my parents' computer) on my computer (running Windows 7 Pro x64). It's plugged in as drive D:, so it's not being used except for being scanned by chkdsk. I started it on Friday evening last night and it's been running through today. It looks like it's about 90-95% done according to the progress bar, but it's been progressing so slowly that I do not know if it will complete before Hurricane Irene hits this weekend (we expect rain and then wind to pick up Saturday afternoon-evening). It is very likely that we'll have power fluctuations/outages during this storm, and I do not want my computer to simply lose power in the middle of running chkdsk on that drive, and since it's taken so long and it's almost done, I don't want to simply cancel and start over later.

So, my thought is that perhaps I could simply hibernate the computer before the storm hits. If I do that, would it create any problems when resuming the computer, thereby resuming chkdsk? Basically, is there anything about the tool that requires it to be on at all times during the course of its run, or can I allow it to hibernate without any issues?

I have hybrid sleep enabled on my computer, so I likely will simply sleep it and if the power goes out, let it turn off (since I can then unhibernate it later). This should work, right?

Answer 1

Is it a removable drive/USB drive? If so, then you may run into problems with it not spinning up/initializing fast enough, and causing a disk-read timeout.

Otherwise, there’s no technical reason for it to have problems. It is quite normal/possible for a system to be accessing a drive when standby or hibernation is initiated. When you resume, it should just pick up where it left off (it assumes that nothing drastic has changed such as a removable drive no longer being present).

However, since you are using the /r switch to effect repairs (if necessary), you may want to wait until a point at which it is clearly only reading and not writing, then manually initiate hibernation at that point. That said, standby and hibernation are supposed to flush the drive cache to the disk, so even if you had a pending write before going into hibernation, it should be fine. (I can’t find the technical doc which says that at the moment, but it was a problem at one time and has long since been fixed.)

You could try changing the profile of the disk (from performance to quick-removal), but that more than likely requires a reboot, which would defeat the point.

Like you said, you’ll need to make sure that you use the mode that XP called hibernation, in that the RAM is flushed to the disk and thus, power can be completely removed, as opposed to what it called standby, in which a loss of power means a loss of state. If I’m not mistaken (I set the option one time, a while back, so I don’t remember it well), but I believe that “hybrid” is indeed the mode that flushes to disk, so you should be fine if the power goes out.

As a side note, you may want to look into why it is taking so long. A disk check should usually be at most a few minutes, and that’s with tens of thousands of files and folders on a FAT32 volume.

Answer 2

Because it should only scanning the disk, in all likelihood you should be perfectly OK shutting the computer down.

Only if it is in process of actually repairing sectors when it loses power will it cause trouble, and most problems it could cause could easily be resolved by a subsequent scan once the weather blows over.