OT: Windows false alarms...

[Fairlight]

If you do a checkdisk on a drive from My Computer in Windows (XP Home
here), there -is- the possibility of it saying that it's unable to finish,
yet having no problems whatsoever with the disk, including at the sector
level.

Had one pull that on me.  I always take, "Windows was unable to finish
checking the disk," as a failure.  I ran a full checkdisk, including
filesystem checks/repairs and bad sector recovery, and it found -nada-.

My suspicion is that, like its older Win9x brethren, if something else
accesses the disk it's working on at the wrong time or too often, it's the
equivalent of the old "retried 10 times, giving up" from the older version.
Can't prove it, as it's not documented.  But the boot-time one gives it a
clean bill of health.

Not only that, -before- I did the thorough boot-time check, I ran ten
regular disk checks, identically configured to the one that didn't
complete, after that one didn't complete.  All ten finished and said it was
complete.  Then, out of paranoia, I did the full one JUST to be sure.

That message is -not- an automatic death sentence for a drive or filesystem.

mark->
-- 
"Moral cowardice will surely be written as the cause on the death
certificate of what used to be Western Civilization." --James P. Hogan