[SOLVED] Confusion about HDD disk checking

[Campo1988]

Hello.

I have an internal laptop HDD connected externally via a USB dock. The dock's power cable can be a bit loose at times, so sometimes it disconnects and powers the dock, therefore the drive or drives in it, off. I have heard that sometimes when it happens, when the computer is not shut down, that the read/write heads of the drive, which is in the dock, crashes into the drive's platter or platters. I have run checkdisk using only the following commands -

chkdsk [drive letters]:

where the drive has 3 partitions - two which I created and a system reserved one, as it is from a laptop, as I said (I haven't formatted and partitioned the drive yet since removing it). After checking the 3 partitions on this drive, each time the results for each partition tells me -

0 KB in bad sectors.

This has happened when the drive is what one might consider idle. It is still connected and spinning, but nothing is being read from/written to it (I hope). The dock has a flashing light on it to indicate such. I have chosen to not run a 3 or 5-stage chkdsk scanning on it, partly in case it is a waste of time, but also partly because I have read before that Windows's error-checking can sometimes make things worse.

Are these results for each of the partitions on this drive false-positives, or have I just been incredibly lucky? Would you recommend any other third-party error-checking programmes, and if so what would you recommend?

Thanks.

 

[popatim]

The basic check disk wont report what hasn't been detected already so you're waiting for the drive to try and read/write to a sector that is bad.

With possible head crashes, I say possible because some drives have protections built in that will sustain the drive long enough to park the heads, it's best to make sure you're backups are in order. Important data should always have multiple copies on various devices, just don't let your external drive be your 'only copy'.