Disk Check for Consistency @ Bootup

[James546]

Hi everyone.

Sorry if this is the wrong section for it, but I assumed it would be as it is linked to my HDD.

I booted up my PC today and I had a black screen message stating that my C: drive needs to be checked for consistency, I immediately thought that my HDD is gone and I'd lose some of my data (I usually backup on the first day of every month, so I'm okay data wise), I hit a key to skip ahead as it said and it booted into windows just fine, everything loaded okay and I'm now in process of backing up everything before I proceed to find the problem/s. The PC has been up for 4 hours now and I haven't experienced a blue screen issue or any freezing.

So for information purposes:
I run Windows 7 64bit.
My HDD is a Hitachi HDT725032VLA360 320GB.
I have never seen this screen before.
My PC is very old now, at least 6-7 years without breaking down once.
I try to backup and defrag the HDD very often to keep it in good shape.
I don't really understand what the disk check does, I just know it scans a section of the HDD for corrupted data and tries to fix it, or something like that.

Once I backup my data, I want to look into this, and I'll probably need a bit of help, so that's why I'm posting here. I am currently saving up for a new computer but this one must last me until I get the newer one as I need it for studying.

If anymore info is needed, just mention it and I'll find out.

Thanks in advance for reading!

 

[wazza300]

its normal,just means its checking for any errors and corrects them,mine does it from time to time on a Seagate hdd,still working fine

 

[James546]

Thanks for the fast reply.

That's good to know, I usually worry about any kind of little thing and since I've never seen it before, I just wanted to make sure about it. I'll probably restart shortly and see if it comes up. If so, I might as well let it run through.

EDIT: I backed up the computer, restarted it and got the same message prompt again, I let the disk check run though entirely (took around 20 minutes) and no errors were found, it froze for a few seconds at 34% but that's all, went very smoothly. The PC restarted again at the end and it booted up as normal. So I assume that's panic over for now. I'll make sure to keep tabs on things just incase though.

 

[yashiro]

Not sure why you skipped the check.

From an admin command prompt:

chkdsk /f - to fix any filesystem errors.

chkdsk /r - to check and recover from serious disk issues. Takes a long time on mechanical HD's.