# Is it safe to reboot during CHKDSK?



## aerynblueyes (Dec 11, 2007)

Just under a month ago I experienced every computer user's nightmare for the first time - the Blue Screen of Death. I rebooted from my recovery disk, ran CHKDSK a few times to get things running again, and things were fine after that, albeit everything was running much slower - it took up to half an hour to load my desktop, programs took longer than usual to start up, et cetera. I defragged my system to no avail - the number of fragments was decreased by almost half but the speed didn't change.

Last night, I decided I'd had enough, and I started backing up my data in preparation to return my PC to factory settings. I was zipping up some irreplaceable images when bang, my system restarted and I copped the BSoD again. I started up CHKDSK again, and it has now been running for just over 15 hours straight, where it is currently steady at 51%. The last CHKDSK I ran, each time it took a couple of hours to seemingly fix things.

I'm not very computer savvy, so I was hoping you could all help me out with this - is it normal for CHKDSK to take this long, and is it safe to reboot during this process? I kind of want to get back to backing up my data so I can take things back to the way they were when I got my laptop, so any help is much appreciated. :smile:


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## twajetmech (Jul 1, 2004)

Hello and welcome to the TSF, its possible to corrupt data doing that, but it certainly sounds like your HDD is going bad, let us know what make and model laptop you have and we can reccomend a replacement. CHKDSK can take a very long time, if it finds a lot of errors and is attempting to repair them.


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## aerynblueyes (Dec 11, 2007)

I thought that might happen. I ended up leaving it, and it restarted fine this morning. Once I get a new power supply and a surge protector I'll be resuming the process of backing everything up.

I unfortunately can't afford a new laptop, but I use a Compaq Presario M2045AP - it's two and a half years old, and has been out of warranty since July 2006.


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## twajetmech (Jul 1, 2004)

You should not need to replace the laptop, just the hard drive, your laptop uses an ata5/6 hard drive, which are easy to replace and not very expensive.....any of these will work.....http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0380+50001306+1035907889&name=Western+Digital
You'll need to remove the old hdd, take it out of the metal shoud (caddy) and remove the pin adaptor off of the old drive to install on the new one. If you have the recovery disk then just pop in the cd drive and load up !


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## aerynblueyes (Dec 11, 2007)

twajetmech said:


> You should not need to replace the laptop, just the hard drive, your laptop uses an ata5/6 hard drive, which are easy to replace and not very expensive.....any of these will work.....http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0380+50001306+1035907889&name=Western+Digital
> You'll need to remove the old hdd, take it out of the metal shoud (caddy) and remove the pin adaptor off of the old drive to install on the new one. If you have the recovery disk then just pop in the cd drive and load up !


Apologies for the late reply, but to be honest that went right over my head. As I said in my original post I'm not very computer savvy, so suggesting I replace components isn't a very good idea! :wink: I ended up formatting and reinstalling from my recovery CD, so the problem I was having has been fixed, and my computer is as good as new. :smile:


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## twajetmech (Jul 1, 2004)

Glad to hear all is well !


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