Chkdsk Stuck at 1% on Stage 4 for 48+ hrs, Win XP

[Aiwin]

I've unfortunately asked XP to repair during its chkdsk run, which has been stuck at 1% on Stage 4 for over 48 hours now. The HDD light on my PC tower is blinking and I don't hear any noises that would indicate physical HDD damage. This is a 250GB NTFS partition, about 85% full, on an SATA HDD.

I've read that this can take a very long time. Should I assume that chkdsk will move forward eventually? Is it true that I'll risk severe damage to the drive by rebooting in the middle of chkdsk? Does anyone have experience with chkdsk taking this long?

Additional background: I ran a chkdsk on the smaller partition where XP is located, just prior to running this current one. That chkdsk found several "unreadable file record segments" and deleted several index entries before finishing. When I rebooted from that chkdsk the system "worked" but still moved very, very slowly - which was what prompted me to run the first chkdsk. So, I decided to run the current chkdsk on the partition that I keep all my media in, and that's where I'm at now. Tons of small files on this partition - I know that's a contributing factor for the speed of the scan/repair.

 

[rgd1101]

shouldn't take that long. Time to replace the HDD.

 

[Fouchey]

Yeah something seems to not be working for sure. When I run it on my 500GB HDD which is only 150GB full it takes about 20 minutes? I'm sure it can take a long time for some situations but 48 hours seems a little unreasonable to me.

 

[DragonChase]

shouldn't take that long. Time to replace the HDD.

Picked as best solution (Y)

 

[neieus]

I would assume at some point it will eventually complete. Are you running chkdsk from inside windows or did you tell it to chkdsk on next reboot? If you are running from a dos box inside windows i'm pretty sure you can just kill the chkdsk. If you do that i would suggest you run chkdsk again but this time use the switch to allow chkdsk to run after next reboot so it runs before the OS loads. The command would be chkdsk /f /r then choose yes.

 

[Aiwin]

Thanks everyone. I agree that it must be time to replace the HDD, but I did schedule this to run at boot time, so I don't know of a way to kill the process without potentiall causing more damage. I'd like to recover as much as I can from the drive. Maybe I'll give it another day, and then (try to) reboot if it still hasn't moved.

 

[rgd1101]

does it sound like it working at all? or just the HDD light is blinking?

It look to me the HDD is physically damage. And wasn't a good idea to run check disk on it because it make it worse by damaging it further.

 

[Aiwin]

Well, I definitely won't make this mistake again, then. Hopefully I can still salvage some of the data on the drive. I guess we'll see! Thanks everyone.

 

[gary king]

What ended up happening with this? Did you let chkdsk finish, or did your hard drive die on you? I'm asking because I also am running chkdsk after I noticed that my computer was sluggish, and right now it's been running for 14 hours so far; it's stuck on a file in Stage 4 (something like file 181,000 out of 250,000).

This hard drive is only about two months old, so I would be saddened if it was already dying.

 

[Aiwin]

No, after several days chkdsk did not finish, so I powered off and replaced the HDD, reinstalled everything. Now I'm trying to decide whether the data on the old drive is worth the cost of (attempted) recovery, and I'm thinking of buying Steve Gibson's Spinrite software. I've been listening to Gibson's Security Now podcast for a long time and I've heard lots of "magic bullet" type stories about Spinrite's recovery capabilities. Has anyone else used the program with success? Apparently it can take days to finish running sometimes, but I guess it works surprisingly well.

This is it, for anyone who doesn't know about it:

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm