15 Problems That Your Plague Your PC
And How to Solve Them


--by Karen Kenworthy, Contributing Editor, Fred Langa, Senior 
Consulting Editor, John Woram, Consulting Editor, Serdar 
Yegulalp, Technology Editor


** Problem No 11: Some of my files suddenly become corrupt, 
unreadable, or even disappear. **

Solution:
Many file system mysteries are caused by bugs or user error 
(accidental deletions, renaming and so on). But if these 
problems occur often, your file system may have 
become corrupted.

Many things can cause file system corruption-power failures; 
system hangs during a disk write; bugs in apps; intermittently 
defective RAM, hard disks or hard disk controllers; even 
Windows itself. A file's directory entry can be overwritten, 
causing it to vanish. Or the data the file contains may be 
unexpectedly altered, causing program crashes and data loss.

To fix these problems, and prevent their spread, run a file 
system integrity check program such as ScanDisk 
(Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools).

ScanDisk performs two types of checks. The Standard Test 
examines every directory entry on a disk, detecting and 
correcting corrupted or invalid file names, modification and 
creation dates, and file sizes. It also examines the disk's 
file allocation table, correcting errors such as disk regions 
neither allocated nor free, or both allocated and free. The 
Thorough Test reads every sector of a disk, both allocated and 
unallocated. If it can't read a sector because of a disk 
surface flaw, ScanDisk attempts to recover the information from 
the bad sector by reading it repeatedly. It then moves the 
information to a spare sector.

You should run ScanDisk often- ideally once a day. Win98 and 
the Win95 Plus Pack include a program called System Agent, 
which lets you schedule tasks like ScanDisk to run at 
set intervals.


 1998 Windows Magazine, April 1999, Page 112.