Surely until an error is found, and is then dealt with, the time can't be estimated accurately.

It knows how many sectors there are, and which index is currently being processed. Time can be gauged during the first 3 phases to calculate how long on average it takes to read a sector. Whilst it takes more time the further you go out, it should be easy to compensate.

No. You are dealing with a case where the disk is severly corrupted (which is why you are running the boot time check) and have no idea how long it will take to scan each sector. The disk may well have physical defects and it may take a number of attempts to read a sector or to decide that it is unreadable. It would be easy to provide a percentage but, in this case, it would be impossible to know that it is meanigful.

You are ignoring the fact that this option is only intnded to be used as a last resort when the disk is in a bad state. Inaccuate information is probably worse than no information.

In reply to a post by AEP:

No. You are dealing with a case where the disk is severly corrupted (which is why you are running the boot time check) and have no idea how long it will take to scan each sector. The disk may well have physical defects and it may take a number of attempts to read a sector or to decide that it is unreadable. It would be easy to provide a percentage but, in this case, it would be impossible to know that it is meanigful.

In addition to that if the indexes are corrupted it's difficult to know how long it will take to fix them back up. NTFS uses B-Trees for directories and in some cases allocation information. Regenerating either of those would be complex and completion hard to predict.

You are forgetting inaccurate information is already being given... Anyway, a completion time isn't important - percentage completed is.

Edited by deleted (Mon 23-Sep-13 17:42:29)

I'd have thought that time to completion was the only information of any importance. If it's got half way in 2 minutes but is going to take 2 days to complete then a reading of 50% would be rather misleading. And what do you mean by percentage completion? Since the last phase is a scan of the physical disk it is always going to take orders of magnitude greater than the other phases. Realistically you would assign 1% to everything but the scan and 99% to the scan.