Before installating the encryption software you must run a CHKDSK to make sure that the hard drive is mechanically healthy.
It is also vital that you run the CHKDSK with the /R command, i.e CHKDSK C: /R because this tells the program to scan the whole disc including free space as opposed to /f which only checks the filesystem.
This scan can take some time, 4 hours for a 120gb drive for example.
After the scan has completed you can check the results:
- Log into windows
- Launch the Event Viewer
- Start > Run
- type “eventvwr” press ENTER
- Under the Application Log look for a recent entry calls Winlogon
- On Windows 7/Vista this entry is called wininit
- Double click on the entry to see the details
- This will display a text based output of the scan results
- Look for the Bad Sectors line
- Providing there are 0 (as in zero) bad sectors it is safe to install the encrption software
- If you have bad sectors on the disc it is in an indication that the drive is unhealthy and should be replaced BEFORE the encryption software is installed.
IMPORTANT: If the machine had more than one partition you should carry out a scan for each drive litter, e.g CHKDSK D: /R
Please Note: In the case of CHKDSK finding bad sectors; whilst we recommend hard drive replacement before a drive is encrypted this is only because the encryption process re-writes every sector of the disk. If you left the laptop un-encrypted it may function perfectly well for some time even throughout the life of the machine.
Reviewed on 16/02/2015