How long is too long for checkdisk?

First a bit of a background: A friend brought me his computer yesterday, with a problem where after displaying the Windows XP logo with the green bar under it, then skipping checkdisk it would give an error saying that something was corrupt and Windows couldn't start. When I asked him when he had last let his computer do checkdisk, he said he had tried a couple of years ago but after three hours it had only got to ~75% and he gave up waiting.

Now the question. I decided to let it run checkdisk and started it at about 7PM yesterday. At 8:20 this morning, it is still going, having done 80%. It is a 40GB hard drive.
Is this too long, and if so does that mean the hard disk is so corrupted it is dead, or will I get away with a repair install of Windows, or is there still hope of everything being ok?

Thanks for reading

 

To be honest, that does sound a tad excessive.
New hard drives are so cheap nowadays, it may be worth buying a new one, doing a fresh install, and running chkdisk in the background on the old drive (as a slave)

 

OK thanks. I would probably do that if it were my computer but for a friend with nothing backed up that will be my last course of action.

It has progressed 2%in the last 40 minutes though, which is three times the speed that it was going last night!

edit: I forgot to say - it is finding a lot of bad clusters.

 

Make a backup in a hurry It sounds like the drive will soon be dead.

 

Thanks for the responses. It has progressed 10% in the last 4 hours, and is now sitting at 92%! It has even managed to survive a power cut which was a nice surprise.

If I can get into Windows, I will recommend (or maybe tell) him to do a backup. I live in hope that it will be sorted!

 

All 5 steps across a 320gb drive on machine in sig took about 2hours.
Drives with many errors may experience a longer time due to the reapirs.

 

I am pleased to report that nearly 22 hours after I started Checkdisk, it is finally complete! But it didn't solve the problem

Still getting "The image COMCTL32.dll is possibly corrupt. The header checksum does not match the computed checksum"

I will try again then do a repair install which I hope should work.

 

If you have a USB disk available with 40GB free space I'd recommend you do your friend the favor of backing his stuff up and telling him to order a new drive.

Ooooh!! Just came to think of one thing Is the drive set to PIO or UDMA (or whatever that isn't PIO) mode?

In some rare cases this may complete bog the system.

Right click "My Computer" -> Manage -> Device Manager -> and check out the settings on the disk interfaces.

 

I have no idea. It is doing the repair atm, and taking approximately 3x that estimated time remaining and I will have a look once we have lift-off
If this were my computer I would have given it up for dead by now.

And yes - once I have got back into Windows I will be backing up everything onto my computer but over ethernet as I have lost my external hard drive

 

Right - repair install done... and it goes straight back to checkdisk. I am going to try and see if a live cd can get everything off it, then completely reformat.

Update: neither the Ubuntu 6.10 or 7.10 CDs work. Humph. I could try and use a different distro, but I guess that would fail. Now to find someone with a 2.5" external caddy...

 

What do you mean the liveCDs don't work? If they fail to boot the machine I think you should try the HDD out in another machine to see if it runs a checkdisk in no time. It's sounds a bit suspect what you're experiencing.

 

The live CDs both got to the stage where the brown-ish background appears, and I got a mouse that lagged all over the place. Nothing progressed when left, so I gave up.

I tried my laptop's hdd in the broken laptop, and it didn't boot. I couldn't put the broken one in my laptop as it had a holder stuck onto it with what looked like a "warranty void if removed" sticker.

Someone had nicked my external hard drive without telling me, so I couldn't try putting the broken hard disk in there.

I think there is something beyond just the hard drive that is buggered, but when taken to the people that have to deal with warranty replacements, they told the owner of it to just buy a new hard drive.

Thanks for all your help on this. I think I have done as much as I can.

edit: Put the hard drive from my external in it (the computer), installed Windows and it seems to be ok, which is good!