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My 6 year old Lenovo laptop running Win XP Home is taking lot of time to boot up. It complains every time I boot that some part of hard disk has been corrupted and asks me to run Chkdsk. I can understand why it is screwed up. Besides it being archaic, thanks to my toddler who often bangs it whenever he feels like!

But I have no option but to live with with it at least until this Christmas, when I am hoping to get a Lenovo Thinkpad loaded with Win 8.

My dilemma is whether or not to run Chkdsk. Because now it starts despite complaining. Just that it takes lot of time to boot and sometimes it boots and then shuts down itself and reboots. I have to be very patient and really try couple of times. Sometimes it freezes despite starting up windows. I am happy with it for the time being until I upgrade.

I also have a dual-boot and use Grub to load Ubuntu hardly anytime.

I just want to get it going for 4 more months. I don't want to regret running Chkdsk if it really screws up my PC and kills it. Some advice please? Thank you.

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  • Have you ever consider just buying a new hard drive, much cheaper solution for the short term.
    – cybernard
    Jan 27, 2018 at 15:44

3 Answers 3

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Yes you can run chkdsk /f to fix the errors on entire drive and there are very small chances to lost your data, for that case you can backup your data. For backup you can use external HDD or DVD's.

Also you have to run defragment utility provided by the Windows which will help you increase the speed of your system. Download the CC cleaner and scan your system for the junk files and delete them it will also help you out to make it fast.

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If you have an external drive, create an up-to-date backup of all your important data (or at least as much as possible given the drive problems) and then run chkdsk with the /r option (same as checking the "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" option in the GUI). Note that this might take hours, depending on how bad the situation is. I think marking the bad sectors ought to at least enable you to keep this laptop running for a while longer without complaining as much.

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  • I have hard disk but that is so full. And I don;t really have that important data on my hard disk. I backed all important data ( photos and videos) to Cloud on Drop box and Google Drive. Thanks for your help. Sep 20, 2012 at 3:20
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chkdsk /R will mark the bad sectors so the operating system doesn't try to use them, and tries to reallocate to working sectors.

Once the bad sectors are hidden, it may increase the performance of your laptop. Windows will spend a great deal of time trying to re-read bad sectors. Often your laptop will freeze for several minutes before windows gives up on the sector. However, as long as the sector is not marked bad, and hidden it will continue to freeze the system every time windows tries to read it.

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