Boot partitions are special in many ways, and one of those ways is that they require special handling for CHKDSK to be able to deal with them.ĬHKDSK needs to be able to lock any boot drive it scans, meaning that it cannot examine the system’s boot drive if the computer is in use. In our example, it’s: chkdsk C: /x /r Using CHKDSK on a Boot DriveĪ boot drive is the partition of your hard drive that the computer starts up from.
To summarize, the full command that should be typed into the Command Prompt is: chkdsk /? – The /? parameter displays a help file containing this list of parameters and other instructions for using CHKDSK.Use this parameter after imaging a volume to a new hard disk drive.
It clears the list of bad clusters on the volume and rescans all allocated and free clusters for errors.
The “/x” parameter tells CHKDSK to dismount the drive (take it offline from the operating system) before the process begins.
The “/r” parameter performs the same tasks as “/f”, which fixes errors on the disk, and also tells CHKDSK to locate any bad sectors and recover any readable information it finds there. In this case, to get CHKDSK to do a full scan and repair pass, we typed “ chkdsk c: /x /r“. In a Windows PowerShell program, parameters are additional commands added to the end of the program name, with “/” characters before each parameter. That’s why, to run CHKDSK in a mode where it will actually fix problems that it encounters, you need to add several parameters.
The basic invocation of CHKDSK, simply “chkdsk ”, will scan the disk and display status information, but it will not fix any errors that are encountered. Reboot into recovery mode to perform the scan or create a Windows Recovery Tool, to perform the process. If you’re having issues with running the above command because the drive is in use by another process, that because you’re trying to scan your primary drive (boot drive), when it’s being used by the OS.You can also type “ chkdsk /scan” to scan the disk online and attempt to repair it. Now, type “ chkdsk c: /x /r“, without the quotes, to dismount the drive, scan it for errors, and repair it.The next screen to appear is a User Account Control (UAC) window which will ask for permission to launch the Windows Command Processor and let it make changes to the PC.Right-click the Start menu and select, Windows PowerShell (Admin).