Growing up on Macintosh Computers (1988 was my first computer – a Macintosh SE with a whopping 8MHz, 9″ B&W screen, 20MB HD, and 1MB RAM), my knowledge of some very basic Windows operations is sometimes lacking. Moving from the Mac to a linux world probably didn’t help much either. Hey, at least I started to learn what IRQ’s were.

I had no idea how to use the DOS command prompts to do what I wanted. I was used to the linux style commands (who knew that dir was the same as ls?). I was also used to the fact that the Mac had no utilities to defrag, clean up, or otherwise alter data. The Mac just worked.

Windows, however, sometimes needs a gentle (read “harsh”) push to do what I want it to do. This is where my love of the command line and my necessity to Windows comes into play.

We all know that Windows 98 and ME forced you to run the Check Disk utility on startup if you shutdown the computer improperly. Probably a good 99% of the time I would bypass this check as I already knew the issue. That and I’m impatient.

So without further ado, here’s the command to run check disk:
Start >> Run >> CMD
chkdsk This will run Check Disk in read-only mode and will not repair any issues it finds
chkdsk C:/f This will run Check Disk in forced repair mode, but it will not check for bad sectors on the HD
chkdsk C:/r This will run Check Disk in repair mode, locate bad sectors, and recover readable information

With all that out of the way – I’m thinking about moving this site to a new one. The only problem with that is the fact that google has this site already cached for searching. We’ll think about it.

***EDIT***
chkdsk c: /f /r will do the same as both of the commands. This will scandisk your entire system – ie it’ll scan for bad sectors etc.