The most fragile -- yet critical -- component in any computer is the hard disk. While hard drives have become much more dependable in the past 15 years, accidents still happen, and when they do, it's your data that gets chewed up and spat out like digital bubble gum.

To complement the increased reliability of hard drives, the file systems used with them have also evolved. In Windows, FAT gave way to FAT32 and now NTFS (New Technology File System) -- or, rather, NTFS went from a server-only piece of exotica to the file system used on the desktop.

But a few things haven't changed, and one of them is the tool used to keep the file system consistent when things go wrong: chkdsk.

What is chkdsk?
Chkdsk's existence is encapsulated in the pronunciation of its name: check disk. When you run chkdsk from an administrator-level command line, it analyzes a particular volume -- hard drive, solid-state drive, removable disk, etc. -- for problems that might indicate an easily-fixed inconsistency or hardcore data corruption.

The most common form of the chkdsk command is:

    chkdsk <volume> /f

    Where:

        * <volume> is a drive letter, e.g., C:
        * The /f switch tells chkdsk to fix errors and not simply produce a report about the state of the disk, which is what happens if you run chkdsk with the volume name as the only parameter and no other switches.

Note that running without the /f parameter can return incomplete inform