Whoa! I’d forgotten how time-consuming and intricate the built-in Window disk checker can be. My pithy summation, as I prep the old drives on my soon-to-be-retired i7 Skylake PC is: CHKDSK follies follow drive prep. And with 9 disk drives to prep and clean up to make that move, that’s more than enough folly for anybody, including me. For the record, I’m using the CHKDSK /f /x command.

What CHKDSK Follies Follow Drive Prep Means

As the lead-in graphic illustrates — it shows 5.25 hours to grind the fix and clean operation to completion — it takes real time to make all this happen. I left it running when I left my desk last night, and the time info was waiting for me when I logged back in this morning. Only 8 drives left to go!

The 5 stages of CHKDSK run as follows:

1. Examining basic file system structure
2. Checking file name linkage
3. Examining security descriptors
4. Looking for bad clusters in user data file
5. Looking for bad, free clusters

Now that I’m on my second of 9 drives it looks like CHKDSK spends most of its time on the two final stages. It took 5.22 hours for Stage 4 on the first drive. The second, now underway, is estimating about the same amount of time for stage 5. I’ll follow up with more numbers later.

Isn’t that just the way things go in Windows-World sometimes? The job has to get done. Then the waiting begins. It can take a while, as these numbers already intimate (and may later show: I’ll keep track).

Total Times (Follow-Up 5 hrs later)

Looks like the CHKDSK stuff is actually all over the place. I had two drives take less than 1 second (!) to complete, most others came in at or around 1 minute (72 seconds, anyway). The first two drives I tried had trouble in need of repairing, and that skewed my impressions. Go figure! All cleaned up now, though.