The program was first introduced in MS-DOS 6.2 and succeeded its simpler predecessor,
CHKDSK. It included a more user-friendly interface than CHKDSK, more configuration options, and the ability to detect and (if possible) recover from physical errors on the disk. This replaced and improved upon the limited ability offered by the MS-DOS
recover utility. Unlike CHKDSK, ScanDisk would also repair crosslinked files. In
Windows 95 onwards, ScanDisk also had a
graphical user interface, although the
text-based user interface continued to be available for use in single-tasking ("DOS") mode. However, ScanDisk cannot check
NTFS disk drives, and therefore it is unavailable for computers that may be running
NT based (including
Windows 2000,
Windows XP, etc.) versions of Windows; for the purpose, a newer CHKDSK is provided instead. On
Unix-like systems, there are tools like fsck_msdosfs and dosfsck to do the same task. ==See also==