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Microsoft ScanDisk

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SCANDISK operating in text mode on a Windows 98 system.

SCANDISK or ScanDisk is a utility in MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows systems which checks and repairs file systems and bad clusters on the hard drive. It was introduced in MS-DOS version 6.2. Previous versions of MS-DOS supplied only the simpler, purely text-based program CHKDSK.

ScanDisk included a more user-friendly interface than MS-DOS CHKDSK, more command-line and other configuration options,[1][2] and the ability to detect and sometimes recover from physical errors on the disk.[3] Unlike CHKDSK, ScanDisk would also repair crosslinked files.[4]

In Windows 95 onwards, SCANDISK also had a graphical user interface, although the text interface continued to be available for use in single-tasking ("DOS") mode.[5][6]

SCANDISK can't check NTFS disk drives and therefore isn't available for computers running NT based (including Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc.) versions of Windows: a newer CHKDSK is provided instead (not to be confused with the older MS-DOS CHKDSK).

On Unix-like systems there are tools like "fsck_msdosfs" to do the same task.[7]

See also

References

  1. ^ ScanDisk command-line options
  2. ^ MS-DOS 6.2 SCANDISK.INI
  3. ^ This replaced and improved upon the limited ability offered by the MS-DOS Recover utility.
  4. ^ How to repair crosslinked files with CHKDSK notes that users with MS-DOS 6.2 or later should use Scandisk to repair the errors. (Groetjes van Arnold Nijhoving)xxx
  5. ^ Windows 95 Documentation
  6. ^ Description of Scandisk for Windows from the Windows 98/Me documentation.
  7. ^ "fsck_msdosfs". 091108 freebsd.org