Cancelling disk check (from within Windows7), possible?

[kevkay]

Dear forum members,

I hope me posting this thread is ok. I decided to do a checkup on my usb 1TB external Verbatim bus powered HDD via checkdisk (windows has told me to do so for a long time now). This wasn't nessecary since the HDD worked fine, but just to be sure I did. I started checkdisk with 'scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors' checked, but I am convinced it will take at least a day to finish..

This far it came after an hour and a half or so..

This made me wonder, there is a cancel button i can press, will this damage my drive in any way?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

 

[Shintaro]

You should be able to cancel, but let the system close the program. If you reset the computer before the program has closed you'll most likely do file system damage.

On a side note, I personally use Spinrite (https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) It costs money, but has saved me a lot. It is fast and quite good at data recovery.

Hope this helps.

 

[kevkay]

Thanks for the tip! I decided to wait it out and it finished in about 2,5 hours or so and it ended succesfully, but I'll know that cancelling the process won't break anything next time.

 

[TrainableMan]

Correct, if you let the program actually "cancel" when you hit the cancel button then it finishes what it is currently doing to end cleanly.

I don't know if I would say "most likely do file system damage" because with write caching it will likely still be OK, unless you just completely kill the power. Soft reboots (holding the button on the case for 6 seconds) still trigger shut down procedures, though you may loose unsaved work. But any time you just "pull the plug" you risk loosing data, not just when running chkdsk; that is why an uninterrupted power supply (UPS) is a good idea ... so mother nature or the electric company can't just "pull the plug"

 

[Shintaro]

Good point, I need to be clear with my definitions.

To me "reset" is pressing a button that hardware resets the motherboard, essentially "pulling the plug". That is what I was meaning when I used the word "reset".

I forgot that reset can be interpreted as a restart.
Also I had forgotten about the "soft reboot".