Not to be confused with
SanDisk.
Microsoft ScanDisk (also called ScanDisk) is a diagnostic utility program included in
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...
and
Windows 9x
Windows 9x is a generic term referring to a line of discontinued Microsoft Windows operating systems released from 1995 to 2000 and supported until 2006, which were based on the kernel introduced in Windows 95 and modified in succeeding version ...
. It checks and repairs
file systems errors on a disk drive, while the system starts.
Overview
The program was first introduced in MS-DOS 6.2
and succeeded its simpler predecessor,
CHKDSK
In computing, CHKDSK (short for "check disk") is a system software, system tool and command (computing), command in DOS and Microsoft Windows (and related operating systems), as well as Digital Research FlexOS, IBM/Toshiba 4690 Operating System, 4 ...
. It included a more user-friendly interface than
CHKDSK, more configuration options, and the ability to detect and (if possible) recover from physical errors on the disk. This replaced and improved upon the limited ability offered by the MS-DOS
recover utility. Unlike
CHKDSK, ScanDisk would also repair crosslinked files.
In
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...
onwards, ScanDisk also had a
graphical user interface
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...
, although the
text-based user interface
In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI) (alternately terminal user interfaces, to reflect a dependence upon the properties of computer terminals and not just text), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an ear ...
continued to be available for use in single-tasking ("DOS") mode.
However, ScanDisk cannot check
NTFS
NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s.
It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...
disk drives, and therefore it is unavailable for computers that may be running
NT based (including
Windows 2000
Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RT ...
,
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct successor to Windows 2000 for high-end and business users a ...
, etc.) versions of Windows; for the purpose, a newer
CHKDSK is provided instead.
On
Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...
systems, there are tools like
fsck_msdosfs and
dosfsck to do the same task.
See also
*
fsck
The system utility fsck (''file system check'') is a tool for checking the consistency of a file system in Unix and Unix-like operating systems, such as Linux
Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the L ...
*
List of DOS commands
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
{{Windows Components, management
External DOS commands
Hard disk software