My external 500gb hard drive has become corrupted, and accessing its data incredibly slow. Most of my important data is still available, but I need to run chkdsk to repair as much as I can. However, doing anything with the drive has become incredibly slow, and there must be hundreds of GB of corrupted data that chkdsk has to get through.
If I delete all non-important data on the drive, will chkdsk skip it and speed up?
22 Answers
When you work with corrupted drive, you shouldn't touch it (including removal) until properly repaired with the relevant software as you make the things worse with your corruption.
When removing files, you really don't removing them, but unlinking the references to the files (MFT/B+ tree). So when chkdsk is doing full scan, it doesn't care if the files were removed or not as it checks for all nodes (including deleted files as well).
When chkdsk takes a long time to scan, you can't speed it up (unless you use different software), it just needs that time, especially when you have bad sectors or there are some hardware issues (issues caused by a sudden severe motion of the disk such as a head failure or a head crash).
If you want to speed up the scanning, the only way is to mirror/backup your whole partition (e.g. Partition Magic or Norton Ghost) and scan it on more healthy drive.
It won't speed up the check for bad sectors, which has to hit the entire drive anyway. I recommend running chkdsk overnight on the drive as it is. The file system already has problems, and the more you change, the more chance there is for those problems to grow.
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