Scandisk runs a long time - how long should it take?

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Summary: The size of your drive may affect how long scandisk takes to run, but an unusual amount of time may signal an additional problem.

Scandisk found some bad sectors on my hard disk but it is taking too long to mark them - days just to mark 24 clusters. Is there any faster way? Is there any disk utility that can mark bad sectors faster?

You didn't say how big the drive is, but "days" is way out of line, even for scandisk.

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This resource on computing.net has a bunch of ideas, in particular "never finishes". The basic issue is that scandisk will keep restarting if another process touches the disk while scandisk does its job.

For really tough problems, a great tool I've used recently for hard disk recovery and repair is SpinRite, from Gibson Research. Norton System Works is another alternate tool. Both may do a better job than scandisk.

But if it's not your boot drive, it might be faster overall and cheaper to reformat. Backup your data, reformat the drive making sure to do a thorough reformat, not 'quick format', and then restore the data.

Related:

Ask Leo! - How do I fix a bad sector on my hard drive?

Article 2393 | Posted February 18, 2005

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