When I built my new computer, I gave my old one to my parents who were in dire need of an upgrade, after cleaning everything out of it, of course, leaving just the OS and a few programs. It worked fine for a while, before it started to fail to load Windows (it would just get stuck). After investigating this behavior and asking around, I decided that it might be a failing hard drive, so I pulled it out and plugged it into my own computer to run chkdsk on it (I initially did this to try and boot to the drive, but since my computer is set up with RAID and that Windows installation didn't have RAID drivers, I just booted into my own Windows 7 installation and ran chkdsk on it).
I did this last Friday evening, and it's been running since then (which makes it about 6 days so far). I am not surprised since it can be slow, it's a 1 TB hard drive, and a Western Digital "green" one at that, so it's likely running at a slower RPM anyway. I do see it make progress, so I know it's not stuck, and the hard drive light has been perpetually on, on my computer, which I haven't used for much of anything else, other than sharing files over the network and light web browsing, while this has been running.
My computer has 16 GB of RAM, and is running Windows 7 Pro x64. Why does chkdsk take up 90% of that? It's holding that level steady, and has been for days, going between 90% and 91%, as it frees and fills memory constantly. CPU usage is very low (which I expect since this is a very I/O heavy operation).
It doesn't look like anything bad is going on, but I am curious. Why is chkdsk taking up so much memory? I am at least glad that it seems to be doing this intelligently, as it's maintaining a high level without starting to thrash the main HDD by paging.
Does anyone know? Is this normal?