[neverborn]

question: when windows determines a drive is dirty, is there something SERIOUSLY wrong with it? cos this happened to my dad's pc a while back and after reading up a little in Help and Support, what i finally did was use 'chkntfs' to exclude his d: drive from being checked at startup ant that was that... but from some recent posts here i've found out that maybe i shouldn't have stopped there?

i guess what i'm asking is, what causes this flag in the first place? any ill effects? i'll follow the staff's instructions on 'unsetting the dirty bit' in the otherposts. thanks

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Hello neverborn...how's it going?

A very much simplified explanation of the dirty bit is this: The HDD is formatted into clusters of information called, ironically, clusters. Each cluster is composed of a certain number of bits that are arranged in such a way that the machine can read the information the cluster contains. On occasion, one of these clusters will have the information rearranged in a way that makes it difficult for the machine to read. When this happens, it is marked with a bit of information at the beginning of the cluster telling the machine that this cluster needs to be rearranged by chkdsk. This is the "Dirty Bit" and the only way to clear it is to run a thorough chkdsk procedure to rearrange the cluster to where it can be read by the machine again. Once all the bits are back in the correct order, the extra bit is removed.

So, to answer your question, in most cases this bad cluster is not really a critical issue at the time, but it will flag the drive so it can't be defragged until the bad cluster is repaired...not being defragged can lead to other issues such as slow application loading and other slowing of the system as it has to search the drive for the information it needs.

Yes, the drive should be scanned. If it not the root directory (C: drive), the drive letter in the instructions will need to be adjusted to check the drive that contains the dirty bit.

Does that make any sense at all?

wannabe1

[wannabe1]

Hello neverborn...how's it going?

A very much simplified explanation of the dirty bit is this: The HDD is formatted into clusters of information called, ironically, clusters. Each cluster is composed of a certain number of bits that are arranged in such a way that the machine can read the information the cluster contains. On occasion, one of these clusters will have the information rearranged in a way that makes it difficult for the machine to read. When this happens, it is marked with a bit of information at the beginning of the cluster telling the machine that this cluster needs to be rearranged by chkdsk. This is the "Dirty Bit" and the only way to clear it is to run a thorough chkdsk procedure to rearrange the cluster to where it can be read by the machine again. Once all the bits are back in the correct order, the extra bit is removed.

So, to answer your question, in most cases this bad cluster is not really a critical issue at the time, but it will flag the drive so it can't be defragged until the bad cluster is repaired...not being defragged can lead to other issues such as slow application loading and other slowing of the system as it has to search the drive for the information it needs.

Yes, the drive should be scanned. If it not the root directory (C: drive), the drive letter in the instructions will need to be adjusted to check the drive that contains the dirty bit.

Does that make any sense at all?

wannabe1

[neverborn]

Thanks for enlightening me! yes it actually does make sense...read about clusters[and how they take up space] before i tried partitioning for the first time... and i guess his drive's okay now since he's been able to defrag the said drive already...

thanks for always helping out[from major issues to the most minute questions]!!