After Scan Disk is initiated, can you/should you stop the process before it completes the surface scan. For instance, let's say Scan Disk has gotten to the point of doing the surface scan and is taking "forever". After it gets past the used cluster area, is it OK to Exit, or would that be potentially harmful to the hard drive in question? Can it be exited while still scanning the used cluster area?
This process has been running on a 40 gig HD now for over 24 hours and is barely 50% complete. Driving me nuts! I would like to stop it. I'm trying to "flush" an NTFS volume so Ghost won't fuss about it when I try to clone it to a laptop drive. Going to also run chkdsk /f after can disk is done or I stop it. Tried to run chkdks from command prompt, but was advised by system alert to run Scan Disk instead? Don't think I should have done this-at least not from command prompt. To do so via XP Pro, I would have to hook the drive up as a slave and run it from the primary, which is what I think I should have done. Need somebody's take on that as well. Thanks.
You could have done it with the GUI via right clicking C:\ drive and going to properties click on tools then error checking. It should not affect the drive in the least when you cancel it. The reason it is taking forever is probably because the OS is a dinosaur and the mobo isn't capable of accepting enough RAM to make the job of processing all the sectors in a timely fashion.