Absolute Beginners Guide to A+ Certification. Covers the Hardware and Operating Systems Exam

ScanDisk Command Reference

These are the options you can use to run ScanDisk , the disk-repair tool included with Windows 9x/Me.

To check and repair a drive, use the following syntax: SCANDISK [drive: /ALL] [/CHECKONLY /AUTOFIX [/NOSAVE]] [/SURFACE] To check and repair an unmounted DriveSpace compressed volume file, use: SCANDISK drive:\DRVSPACE.nnn [/CHECKONLY /AUTOFIX[/NOSAVE]] To examine a file for fragmentation, use the following syntax: SCANDISK /FRAGMENT [drive:][path]filename To undo repairs you made previously, use the following syntax: SCANDISK /UNDO [drive:] For [drive:], specify the drive containing your Undo disk. /ALL Checks and repairs all local drives. /AUTOFIX Fixes damage without prompting. /CHECKONLY Checks a drive, but does not repair any damage. /CUSTOM Configures and runs ScanDisk according to SCANDISK.INI settings. /NOSAVE With /AUTOFIX, deletes lost clusters rather than saving as files. /NOSUMMARY With /CHECKONLY or /AUTOFIX, prevents ScanDisk from stopping at summary screens. /SURFACE Performs a surface scan after other checks. /MONO Configures ScanDisk for use with a monochrome display. To check and repair the current drive, type SCANDISK without parameters.

The Scandisk.ini file can be used to customize the operations of ScanDisk . Scandisk.ini can be opened with any text editor (try Notepad within Windows, or EDIT from the command prompt) and contains complete notes on how to adjust the default configuration settings for Scandisk.exe .

If ScanDisk is run from the Windows Startup group , different options (which can be combined) are used, because the Windows GUI version of ScanDisk will be run instead of the text-mode version:

• Scandisk X: ” Runs ScanDisk on drive specified.

• Scandisk /a ” Runs ScanDisk on all local hard drives.

• Scandisk /n ” Runs ScanDisk on current drive and quits automatically when finished.

• Scandisk /p ” Runs ScanDisk in read-only mode; no errors will be fixed.