Vista - CHKDSK runs and runs...

I have a Dell with a 500Gb hard drive and decided to ask for a diskcheck at next boot with the repair option. It started 25 hours ago and the screen is blank. The HD light flicks once per second.
How long should I leave it like this before pulling the plug?
Is this an expected time to run?
Thanks for opinions...

John

Till its done. Did you find any errors or allocation problems? Does it find issues and crash?

Try
Start
All programs
Accessories
Right click on command prompt and choose run as administrator
In box, chkdsk c:/r
Follow the prompts to run at reboot. Reboot and let it run.

Thanks - but it's still running! thats 30 hours... Nothing on screen but one flick of HD light per second.

Restart it and run chkdsk /r repair mode like I posted. You could also boot the OS CD and run the repair mode from administrative mode.

Well I did pull the plug after 35 hours and everything started just fine. What chance if I start this again I wont have another long down time? I dont think I should have done it in the first place...

No, that's NOT normal...something froze it up.
Checkdisk on a 500G drive should still be no longer than an hour or so, and that's if it finds things that need doing as it doesn't check the entire 500G's, only the used space and MFT.

Giver her another go and see what happens. You can also try Michael's suggestion to run it from a command line with admin privileges, that may help but if it goes longer than a few hours then pull the plug again and let us know what happened. Maybe also check your Event Viewer and your CBS log for any info. The CBS log can be found in Windows\logs\CBS\CBS.log
It can be rather large, like 60MB plus so check the Date Modified info because it could also be logged in the smaller CBS.persist.log file. Notepad can look like it freezes up opening this large a file so use Wordpad instead. Or if you have a 3rd party program like NoteTab Lite (free editor) that's even better. Scroll to the bottom and look for the time entry for when you ran chkdsk and see if there's any info on it...there should be.

Chkdsk can take hours to run. It depends on many factors. If their is a driver performance issue or a bad drive, it will slow down. You should see it on the screen.

That is more indicative of a failure somewhere.

Michael is right, in that it *can* take a really long time, again, YMMV, but the key is that if it *is* encountering an error you most certainly should *not* be getting a blank screen. Also, a HD light blinking once a second it indicative more of a system halt state - I saw that plenty of times with my older P4 machine running Vista when it would inexplicably just decide to stop working - usually if I had been away for a long period of time. It is most definitely not normal.

Chappy is right - try it again - if it happens again, give it *one* more shot - if it happens all three times then I would say it is a 100% reproducible problem and you need to consider troubleshooting a problem that may not be manifesting itself in Windows (yet).

THanks folks
John