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Hi all I have a C: and D: drive on one single physical hard disk, whereby windows is installed on C: and data is stored on D:

After reformatting my computer, how do i verify if after reinstalling windows on C:,

My D: files are safely unaffected?

(I mean when I look in D:, the files are there, however of course at a glance there's no way to tell if there are any "internal" errors with that drive)

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Why are you worried about this exactly? – Ramhound Dec 8 '11 at 17:25
@Ramhound ? So that I could ensure that I do not have to recopy my 500 GB backup files (external HDD) back into the D: drive which may take a couple of hours to run. – Pacerier Dec 8 '11 at 22:44
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2 Answers

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You can make a checksum of the disk contents and verify with a previous one to test whether disk contents have changed.

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up vote 1 down vote

Formatting the C: drive would have no effect on the contents of the D: drive, even if both volumes are present on the same physical drive.

If you want to check the integrity of the filesystem on D: you can invoke chkdsk to validate the filesystem's internal consistency (Start->Run->chkdsk D:->OK). There is no way to determine if a file that should be on D: is missing, however, unless you have an image or full directory listing of D:

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