Thankfully, this does not mean taking the hard drive (or hard disk) out of your computer and peering at it with a magnifying glass.

The great thing about Windows XP and Windows Vista, is that there is an in-built utility to do it for you: it’s called the Scandisk and has been incorporated into every version of Windows since W95.

Now Scandisk is there to check (scan) your drive and it’s looking for both logical and physical errors. Where data is corrupted, or misplaced, then a logical error is said to have occurred. And when the drive has actually been damaged, it has suffered a physical error.

And these faults are quite common, so running a Scandisk is a very useful exercise. You can use this utility to check your hard drive, as well as of course Zip disks and floppy disks.

If you want to run a Scandisk with Windows XP, you go to the Start menu, click on My Computer (right-hand column) and click on C: drive, clicking on Properties. Then click Tools tab and click the Check Now button. You select Automatically Fix File System Errors and off you go, by clicking Start. Before it will perform the Scandisk though, you need to shutdown the computer.

In Vista, click Computer, right click on Local Disc (C:), click Tools tab and then, as with XP, you press Check Now and off you go.

You can of course get a report of the Scandisk, but the only points of interest to the average user is the total disk space, space available and if there are any bad sectors. The first two represent useful information as to what space you have on your hard drive. Bad sectors are not good news, as they represent physical errors and usually indicate a failing disc; and there’s not much you can do about that.

To get this report on Windows XP (it was offered automatically in previous Windows versions), then click Start, Control Panel and Administrative Tools. Then click Event Viewer, then Application. Look for the heading Source and click Winlogin. If there is more than one Winlogin, choose the one whose date was created at the same time as the report and you’ve got it.

Checking Your Hard Drive – Recap

• Scandisk is an error-checking utility;
• physical and logical errors;
• Scandisk report provides state-of-computer snapshot.