I'm a proponent of CHKDSKs. I schedule read-only CHKDSKs as routine maintenance. Occasionally I will work on a friends computer, and I will run a CHKDSK when I start. This weekend I had the pleasure of doing some work on a friends Mac Airbook.
Everything on this Airbook was working fine - No problems. I was doing some installs and config tweaking. I performed a backup on their Buffalo DriveStation (a single-drive USB device) backup that they use for Time Machine (Apple's built-in backup software, for those unfamiliar). Whenever I service a Mac, I run *Disk Utility *and perform a *Verify *against the HDD partitions - and it occurs to me that I should do this to the backup drive as well. This is the equivalent of a CHKDSK. Low and behold, it found errors and prompted me to run a *Repair *- the equivalent of CHKDSK /F. *Repair *ran for about 30 seconds, and prompts that repairs cannot be made and that I should replace the disk. The Mac after-which still allows me to access the drive, but *it programmatically turned-off the ability to write to it*. Needless to say my friend initially gets a bit pissed and blames everything on me - since the Mac never before made any indications as to there being any problems with the drive - and now they have to buy a new one. *I'm awesome.* Note: I know all about *fsck*, but I use the GUI when dealing with friends so things can be more easily shown and explained. Further note: Reformattting the drive works fine on a Mac or a PC. I formatted it HFS, FAT, Ext 3, Ext 2, as well as NTFS - all no problems. But, even on the PC - it fails CHKDSK. -- Espi
