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I noticed my D: drive was marked as dirty and some folders were coming up as corrupted, so I recovered as much data as possible, and then scheduled a chkdsk /r /f on next restart, and I've been here since Thursday (it progressed a bit throughout Wednesday):

I now need to urgently access files on my C: drive, but don't know if I should interrupt this process with a forced power off.

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[-] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 weeks ago

If chkdsk has been running for multiple days, your drive is fucked.

Cancelling it could make it worse, but we're talking a gut stab and losing a finger vs just being gut stabbed.

Don't have that drive powered on more than absolutely necessary. If it's a HDD in a laptop, don't move it if you don't need to, and never while powered on.

For the best chance of getting as much as possible off it: Get access to another computer and make yourself a USB stick with some live-bootable Linux on it (so it runs all from the USB and RAM and the HDD is only in use when copying stuff off). Get another drive of at least the same size, and use a low level disk copying tool to copy the busted drive to your new one. Most of these tools will overwrite whatever is already on the destination disk. I think dd in Linux will work for this, but it's been over a decade since I last had to do this, so best to do some research on your own.

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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