Once in a while, Windows XP hangs on my laptop (usually when going into standby or hibernate and occasionally on startup) and I have to forcefully poweroff.
Ususally chkdsk never runs automatically (I thought it should know that the partitions have nit been unmounted and do that).
I religiously run chkdsk without /F after bad shutdowns like this, and invariably it reports that the drive has unfixed errors and must be checked with /F and I do that, and more often than not, the chdsk that runs on startup does not report fixing anything.
I have had times in the past (and not only just on this system) when not running chkdsk leads to some strange errors like files not opening even though they exist and inability to save certain files, so I make it a point to always chkdsk after bad shutdown.
I never understood why this is : Isnt the whole point of a journalling filesystem like NTFS to avoid file system corruption and endless chkdsks?
I even tried once disabling write caching to see if it made any difference, but to no avail....
