Would you like to keep an eye on your hard drive so you can spot dead sectors before you lose data from them?

Checkdisk, previously known as Scandisk, helps you by testing for these issues whenever you run it. BeYourOwnIT walks you through using it in this video.

Hello and welcome to a free tutorial video brought to you by BeYourOwnIt.com. If you like this video and you want to see more like it, drop by our website and make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Today’s video is on how to run CHKDSK in Windows Vista. It’s been around for a long time. In several Windows versions before, it used to be called Scandisk. It’s really good to run now and again to keep everything smooth and keep an eye on dead sectors, bad sectors in your hard drive. Keep everything together.

So to run it, it’s real easy. You go to My Computer, right‑click on your C: drive, go to properties, and then the tools tab. You’ll see three options. Two of which I’ll recommend running. Maybe check for errors once a month, defrag every couple of months. It really depends on how much you’re installing and uninstalling and how much you’re moving stuff around.

But the idea is that, the more you run these things, the cleaner system you’ll have and the less likely you’ll be to lose files and have errors. So you can click the check now button, so we’ll hit continue, and there’s two checkboxes you see here. Automatically fix file system errors which, of course, you want to do, and scan for and attempt to recover bad sectors. I’d also do that.

You can hit start and it’ll start going. It used to be, definitely with XP, that it would always, always, always run it in safe mode. What you saw there was probably because I’m recording this video or maybe because something else is going on. But I would always tell people to go into safe mode to run it. You may want to do the same thing here.

To get to safe mode, all you do is go to start, restart the computer, start tapping the F8 key across the top, and you’ll get an option. One will say normal startup. Last known good configuration is another one. Then safe mode and you’ll see safe mode with networking.

What I would do is, before you go to sleep one night, boot into safe mode, run the error‑checking, have it automatically fix errors. So that way, when you wake up in the morning, it’s all done, it’s all cleaned. You’ll be able to view your report, restart your computer, and be on with your day.

So running the Scandisk or now it’s called CHKDSK, is really important to keep an eye on any problems that might be coming up. You can catch issues ahead of when they become a big issue. If you notice a lot of bad sectors, you probably need to start thinking about replacing your hard drive. Definitely make sure you back up your data.

So that’s Windows CHKDSK/Scandisk. I hope that this video helped you and, if you need any help beyond this or you want to see more videos like it, shoot on over to our website and make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thank you.