Check Hard Drives for Errors with Free CheckDisk

Hard disk drives (HDD) have been around for so many decades now. With the entry of the solid state drives (SSD) and other flash memory devices, hard drives are preferred today more for their very large storage capacities. While we can get a 2 TB hard drive easily for very cheap, it is around the same price as an expensive 256 GB SSD.

So if you have a large capacity hard disk drive installed on your Windows PC and want to find out whether it is working smoothly, whether it has a sound file system and if your files stored on it have not become corrupt, you can use a freeware tool called CheckDisk. It is not the same tool as Microsoft’s tool of the same name, but it is much more advanced because it uses special algorithms to scan for problems on your hard drive.

First of all you have to change the user interface language for this program manually. When we extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP archive, it unpacks checkDisk.exe along with another folder called language. We have to find a file named new_lang.cfg inside this folder. After opening this file in any plain text editor like Windows Notepad or Notepad++ (recommended), we have to change its contents to language\en_EN\translate.xml in order to set the language to English.

CheckDisk

Using CheckDisk is very easy. It has to be run with administrator level access for it work properly. It can be used in read-only mode when it scans only and doesn’t make any changes to the actual file system. If you want to disable the read-only mode, then you have to select the checkbox Correct Errors.

CheckDisk

You can begin by choosing a drive from the list on the left side and then clicking on the Check button. Depending on the drive size and errors on it, it is going to take shorter or longer time to complete the scanning. If you are not working in the read-only mode, it won’t fix the detected errors.

We tried Microsoft Chkdsk tool on the same partition and it came out clean without any problems. But when we used CheckDisk on the same partition, it came with some file indexing errors.

You can download CheckDisk from https://www.paehl.de/checkdisk.