You must have seen that it happens that your hard drive gets corrupted or there are some errors when downloading or uploading files to the drive. This happens due to the fact that there might be bad sectors in your hard drive. Now, there is a solution to this in Windows known as “Error Checking” tool which lets you check if there are any errors on your drive.
Basically, this tool is a GUI version of the chkdsk or “checkdisk” command. Note that error checking is available on every version of Windows starting from Windows XP and it is still present on the latest version of Windows 10.
How To Scan A Hard Drive Using ‘Error Checking’
To run the “error checking” tool on your hard drive, you have to do the following:
- First of all, right-click on the Start button and click on File Explorer/Windows Explorer.
- Then, select This PC if you are on Windows 10 or Computer if you are on Windows 7.
- Now, you need to select the drive that you want to check. If this is an external drive, there will be a name but if you want to check the drive on your PC which has Windows installed on it then it will be the (C:)
- On that particular drive, right-click and select Properties. Inside Properties, go to Tools section on Windows 10 and select “Check” and then “Scan drive” which will start scanning the drive and tell you to restart the PC if any error were found.
- If you are on Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7, you will be provided with options such as “Automatically fix system file errors” or “scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”. Generally, it is recommended to select option 1 to fix the errors automatically.
- Click on Start once you have selected the option on either Windows 10 or Windows XP/Vista/7 and the scan will be completed shortly.
- After this, follow the recommended advice and continue to use your PC normally.