Hard Drive CHKDSK Errors

[DigitalAssassin]

I've been noticing increasing slowness on our machine and really long disk access times.

So, the past few days I've been running CHKDSK each morning and here is what it returns on the primary NTFS drive (the secondary 20GB drive returns no errors and is just used for non-critical data storage)...

"Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows found problems with the file system.
Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these."

Since it's NTFS, I re-run CHKDSK with /F and it confirms I want to schedule it. I do, and then re-boot and it runs and completes fine with no errors. I immediately re-run CHKDSK (with no /F) and verify it returns no errors. So, we use the machine for the day.

Problem is, I run CHKDSK the next morning and start over with the errors. Anything else I can try or should I just invest in a new drive? This drive is probably ~6 years old.

If a replacement is what is needed, anything special I should look for? I've got this motherboard: http://www.soyousa.com/products/proddesc.php?t=d&id=241 and it looks like it supports both ATA 66/100 and serial ATA.

[FriedFish]

Check the SMART status, see if any alerts have been thrown. Go to your hard drive manufacturer's website and look for a diagnostic tool, it'll check the SMART status. SMART

[DigitalAssassin]

Originally Posted by FriedFish

Check the SMART status, see if any alerts have been thrown. Go to your hard drive manufacturer's website and look for a diagnostic tool, it'll check the SMART status. SMART

Sorry, forgot to mention I did that. Everything has a status of 'OK' on the SMART logs.

[troublesome4u]

http://win-xp-sp.blogspot.com/2004/1...me-bitmap.html

[DigitalAssassin]

Thanks jmaker! He sent me this...

http://www.slickdeals.net/#p8038

Called up the closest Office Max and they still had a single 250GB for $55.00. Yeah, their IDE not SATA but for my problem that's the cheapest solution I'm going to find and I'm quadrupling my capacity to boot!