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All OS installation discs partition and format as part of the OS installation. Windows simply prompts you to partition and then format the drive. Read the screens and you’ll do great.

Maintaining and Troubleshooting Hard Drives

Hard drives are complex mechanical and electrical devices. With platters spinning at thousands of rotations per minute, they also generate heat and vibration. All of these factors make hard drives susceptible to failure. In this section, you will learn some basic maintenance tasks that will keep your hard drives healthy, and for those inevitable instances when a hard drive fails, you will also learn what you can do to repair them.

Maintenance

Hard drive maintenance can be broken down into two distinct functions: checking the disk occasionally for failed clusters, and keeping data organized on the drive so it can be accessed quickly.

Error-Checking

Individual clusters on hard drives sometimes go bad. There’s nothing you can do to prevent this from happening, so it’s important that you check occasionally for bad clusters on drives. The tools used to perform this checking are generically called error-checking utilities, although the terms for two older Microsoft tools—ScanDisk and CHKDSK (pronounced “Checkdisk”)—are often used. Microsoft calls the tool Error-checking in Windows XP/Vista/7. Whatever the name of the utility, each does the same job: When the tool finds bad clusters, it puts the electronic equivalent of orange cones around them so the system won’t try to place data in those bad clusters.

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EXAM TIP CompTIA A+ uses the term CHKDSK rather than Error-checking.

Most error-checking tools do far more than just check for bad clusters. They go through all of the drive’s filenames, looking for invalid names and attempting to fix them. They look for clusters that have no filenames associated with them (we call these lost chains) and erase them. From time to time, the underlying links between parent and child folders are lost, so a good error-checking tool checks every parent and child folder. With a folder such as C:\TEST\DATA, for example, they make sure that the folder DATA is properly associated with its parent folder, C:\TEST, and that C:\TEST is properly associated with its child folder, C:\TEST\DATA.

To access Error-checking on a Windows 2000/XP or Windows Vista/7 system, open My Computer/Computer, right-click the drive you want to check, and choose Properties to open the drive’s Properties dialog box. Select the Tools tab and click the Check Now button (Figure 12-61) to display the Check Disk dialog box, which has two options (Figure 12-62). Check the box next to Automatically fix file system errors, but save the option to Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors for times when you actually suspect a problem, because it takes a while on bigger hard drives.

Figure 12-61 The Tools tab in the Properties dialog box in Windows XP

Figure 12-62 Options

Now that you know how to run Error-checking, your next question should be, “How often do I run it?” A reasonable maintenance plan would include running it about once a week. Error-checking is fast (unless you use the Scan for and attempt recovery option), and it’s a great tool for keeping your system in top shape.

Defragmentation

Fragmentation of clusters can increase your drive access times dramatically. It’s a good idea to defragment—or defrag—your drives as part of monthly maintenance. You access the defrag tool that runs with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7, called Disk Defragmenter, the same way you access Error-checking—right-click a drive in My Computer/Computer and choose Properties—except you click the Defragment Now button on the Tools tab to open the Defragmenter (Figure 12-63).

Figure 12-63 Disk Defragmenter in Windows XP

Defragmentation used to be interesting to watch—once. Now, though, just schedule it to run late at night. You should defragment your drives about once a month, although you could run it every week, and if you run it