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Maintaining and managing your hard drive
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Maintaining and managing your hard
drive
Regular maintenance can keep your hard drive operating efficiently, and good
file management can keep your system free of unwanted files while making
important files secure and easier to find.
Hard drive maintenance utilities
By regularly using the following utilities, you can help maintain the
performance of your hard drive:
■
ScanDisk (Windows 98)
■
Check Disk (Windows NT)
■ Disk Defragmenter (Windows 98)
Using ScanDisk in Windows 98
Bad sectors are parts of a hard drive or diskette that will not hold data. A lost
allocation unit is a group of sectors that has lost its place in the table that the
operating system uses to locate files. ScanDisk checks the hard drive for bad
sectors or lost allocation units and lets you fix them.
Use ScanDisk from once a week to once a month, depending on how often
you use your system. Also use ScanDisk if you have any hard drive problems.
To use ScanDisk:
1 Double-click the
My Computer
icon on the desktop. The My Computer
window opens.
2 Click the drive you want to check.
3 Select
File
, then
Properties
. The drive’s properties window opens.
4 Click the
Tools
tab.
5 At
Error-checking status
, click
Check Now
. The ScanDisk window opens.
6 Select the options you want for checking the drive.
If you want ScanDisk to check more than one drive, press and hold S
HIFT
,
then click on the additional drives in the list of drives to check.