My mentor told me to always run a full chkdsk /r before swapping a drive, and it just saved a client's data.

Had a small business client in Oak Park with a failing boot drive. I was ready to just clone it and swap, but I remembered what he drilled into me. Ran the check, and it found and fixed bad sectors with critical QuickBooks files. The clone would have been corrupted. How many of you still do this as a mandatory step, or do you just trust the SMART status and clone?

3 comments

3 Comments

oliverbailey1mo ago

My old boss had a similar rule for tape backups.

thea1431mo ago

Yeah, that's a solid habit. A buddy of mine skipped that step on a family PC last year, just went straight to cloning a drive that seemed okay. The clone booted, but half their photo library was a mess of corrupted files. It was a real headache to sort out from the original, and some were just gone. He doesn't trust SMART status alone anymore, always runs the check first now. That extra hour can save so much trouble.

patriciar491mo ago

Read an article last year about how SMART can miss early stage problems, especially with SSDs. The writer said bad blocks can happen without warning and a full surface check is the only real way to catch them before a clone. Makes you wonder how many "failed" clones are really from skipping this step, right? I've started doing it on every drive swap now, even the ones that seem perfectly healthy. It just feels like cheap insurance.