Maintaining and managing your hard drive

Regular maintenance can keep your hard drive operating efficiently, and good file management can keep your system free of unwanted files while making important files secure and easier to find.

Hard drive maintenance utilities

By regularly using the following utilities, you can help maintain the performance of your hard drive:

ScanDisk (Windows 98)

Check Disk (Windows NT)

Disk Defragmenter (Windows 98)

Using ScanDisk in Windows 98

Bad sectors are parts of a hard drive or diskette that will not hold data. A lost allocation unit is a group of sectors that has lost its place in the table that the operating system uses to locate files. ScanDisk checks the hard drive for bad sectors or lost allocation units and lets you fix them.

Use ScanDisk from once a week to once a month, depending on how often you use your system. Also use ScanDisk if you have any hard drive problems.

To use ScanDisk:

1Double-click the My Computer icon on the desktop. The My Computer window opens.

2Click the drive you want to check.

3Select File, then Properties. The drive’s properties window opens.

4Click the Tools tab.

5At Error-checking status, click Check Now. The ScanDisk window opens.

6Select the options you want for checking the drive.

If you want ScanDisk to check more than one drive, press and hold SHIFT, then click on the additional drives in the list of drives to check.

Maintaining and managing your hard drive

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