Did canceling chkdsk ruin my hard drive?

leller

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May 30, 2014
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I ran chkdsk on my Toshiba laptop and it seemed to have been stuck trying to repair the same file for about 10 hours. I at the time being unaware of the dangers of stopping chkdsk, stopped it. When I try to boot up the computer, I just get the toshiba splash screen and it is unrespnsive to any attempt to use keycodes to access the BIOS , safe mode, etc. Is my HDD totally fried?
 

axtronic

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Sep 13, 2011
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It is not likely that chkdsk ruined your hard drive. It is far more likely that the same error occurred during chkdsk that caused the issue in the first place. The hard drive was probably going to die either way. chkdsk should never take that amount of time.

EDIT: However, a bad HDD should not affect your ability to get into the BIOS. You will not be able to get to safe mode though, since that is part of the OS (which reside on the hard drive)
 

hans_pcguy

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Nov 13, 2010
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Cancelling chkdsk will not ruin the hard drive. It can mess up a few files though. If it was stuck for 10 hours the hard disk is probably already in very dire shape. There could be a few other causes for it though. Could be a bad cable\connection or it could be Voltage out of spec running the Hard drive. If it is an IDE drive it could even be another drive (dvd or cd) with a bad controller causing the problem.
 

leller

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May 30, 2014
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Is there anything that I should do? I tried using the Recovery Media Disks to no response and I still can`t access anything.
 


NTFS is a journalled file system so only complete operations will be reflected on the file system. If CHKDSK failed on something, the change would not be committed and thus would not be reflected in the file system.

However, if the drive heath is so poor that it spent hours trying to fix a single file then it is likely that the drive itself has failed and will need to be replaced.