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For the first time since many years, I have a disk (SSD that shows 99% health with DiskInfo!) that has a few unreadable files. I tried to open these files with wxHexEditor, and when scrolling in the file content, at a certain point, I get a I/O error / File error. Also I can't copy/paste the file, Windows stops with an I/O error. Idem after a reboot.

I did a chkdsk /f but it didn't notice anything special.

I am now running a long chkdsk /r /f but no error detected so far.

Question: is there a (built-in?) way in Windows to fully read 100% of the bytes of every file on a volume, to make sure that every file is really readable without any I/O error?

NB: afaik, chkdsk only performs checks in the indexes, but does not necessarily attempt to read every byte of every file in the filesystem. How to do the latter?

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    afaik, and how I understand this, chkdsk /r does: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/…
    – Joep van Steen
    Commented Jul 12, 2023 at 21:10
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    Since this is an SSD, it does not bode well. HDD's may have issues with a sector or two, and keep running for years. SSD's, instead, tend to lock writing, if your lucky, or just stop working completely, if not. Make a drive image, salvage what you can, then try to fix the drive, with minimal expectations. At that point, there's little to lose.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Jul 12, 2023 at 22:57
  • @DrMoishePippik Yes, fortunately, I have backup of 99.99% of the data. PS: it seems I'm victim of the Samsung 970 EVO SSD problems (I had no problem with my older 940, 960 many Samsung SSD, but it seems many people have reliability problems with 970 since a few months)
    – Basj
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 11:29
  • Also, Window OS had not been kind to SSD's: tomsguide.com/news/…,
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Jul 13, 2023 at 15:56
  • Run chkdsk /? at a command prompt and read what it tells you about the /r parameter!
    – r2d3
    Commented Jul 16, 2023 at 7:40

2 Answers 2

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  1. Use Total Commander, select everything in the root drive, press F5 for copy, then type nul as the destination
  2. Use specific reading tools like File Read Test
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Question: is there a (built-in?) way in Windows to fully read 100% of the bytes of every file on a volume, to make sure that every file is really readable without any I/O error?

Answer:

/r Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information. The disk must be locked. /r includes the functionality of /f, with the additional analysis of physical disk errors.

enter image description here

Remarks:

Of course, the smallest addressable unit on a drive being a sector, and the smallest addressable unit on a volume being a cluster, chkdsk does not check individual bytes.

IOW chkdsk will attempt to determine the readability of a cluster and in case of read issues will try to recover the data within an entire cluster.

At the drive level errors are determined by the readability of a sector. IOW the drive is able to read the sector that is a requested (even if after error recovery at firmware level) or it is not. If the latter the drive returns an error indicating the sector can not be read and no data is returned for the sector (so either 512 bytes or 4 KB worth of data).

While you're talking about files, eventually this is the level it comes down to. IOW it's not about individual bytes being checked.

Since chkdsk checks all 'sectors' within volume, no errors means that all files are readable.

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