This article applies to Windows XP, Vista, 7 and Windows 8. It is going to show you how to easily perform disk error checking or scan disk to check your hard drive for errors if you think there’s a problem with it. The reason I’m writing this is because one of our employees at a local company here came up to me few days ago and demanded that she gets a new hard drive as the one in her laptop is bad.

I asked her “how do know” and she told me because Windows sometimes won’t startup when she turn the laptop on. After doing some digging, I found that some of the components drivers for the laptop weren’t installed and was causing the laptop to hang at times. After updating all the system’s component drivers, the machine worked without problem ever since.

Just to prove to her that the hard drive wasn’t a problem, I suggested to her to sit with me so we can perform Windows disk scan to see if the hard drive had problems.

Chkdsk (chkdsk.exe) is a command line tool that checks hard drive volumes for errors and problems. The tool helps you find problem and resolve issues with hard drive sectors, lost clusters and cross-linked files and improve performance. It’s a handy tool that comes with Windows.

The next time you wish to check for hard disk errors, follow the steps below to learn how.

In Windows, open Explorer by going to Start –> Computer or My Computer. In Windows 8, press the Windows Key + X on your keyboard then select File Explorer.

When it opens, right-click on the Local Disk ( C: ) and select ‘Properties’

 

 scandisk-windows

 

Next, select the Tools tab and click ‘Check’ or Check Now button.

 

scandisk-windows-1

 

Windows 8 machines will begin checking for disk errors immediately. Windows 7 and previous, you must restart your computer for the error checking to begin.

Enjoy!