Supported Operating Systems: Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, XP
Related Error: Windows has detected a hard drive error
Hard drive errors can cause Windows update failures, system performance issues, boot failure etc. In this article, we will guide you to analyze, fix errors, repair/mark bad sectors, and optimize your system drives.
What is a system drive?
The system drive is the hard disk partition where the Operating system and other applications are installed. In Windows usually C: drive is the system drive.
CHKDSK is a Windows tool that is used for identifying and fixing hard disk drive issues/errors.
Follow these steps to scan and fix system drive errors.
Click the “Start” menu and type cmd.exe or command. Now right-click the command prompt and click “Run as administrator”
If prompted for “User Access Control“; then enter the administrator’s user id and password.
- Type command chkdsk /F in command prompt as shown below and press ENTER key.
If you receive this prompt/message “The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot lock current drive. Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)”, type Y and press enter key.
- Restart your computer to start the scan and repair. This will be performed just before loading Windows. It may take a while to complete full disk scan and repair process.
After the scan CHKDSK fixes errors and loads the Windows Operating system.
CHKDSK command syntax and other useful flags
CHKDSK [volume[[path]filename]]] [/F] [/V] [/R] [/X] [/I] [/C] [/L[:size]] [/B] [/scan] [/spotfix]
volume Specifies the drive letter (followed by a colon), mount point, or volume name.
filename FAT/FAT32 only: Specifies the files to check for fragmentation.
/F Fixes errors on the disk.
/V On FAT/FAT32: Displays the full path and name of every file on the disk. On NTFS: Displays cleanup messages if any.
/R Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information (implies /F, when /scan not specified).
/L:size NTFS only: Changes the log file size to the specified number of kilobytes. If size is not specified, displays current size.
/X Forces the volume to dismount first if necessary. All opened handles to the volume would then be invalid (implies /F).
/I NTFS only: Performs a less vigorous check of index entries.
/C NTFS only: Skips checking of cycles within the folder structure.
/B NTFS only: Re-evaluates bad clusters on the volume (implies /R)
/scan NTFS only: Runs a online scan on the volume
/forceofflinefix NTFS only: (Must be used with “/scan”) Bypass all online repair; all defects found are queued for offline repair (i.e. “chkdsk /spotfix”).
/perf NTFS only: (Must be used with “/scan”) Uses more system resources to complete a scan as fast as possible. This may have a negative performance impact on other tasks running on the system.
/spotfix NTFS only: Runs spot fixing on the volume
/sdcleanup NTFS only: Garbage collect unneeded security descriptor data (implies /F).
/offlinescanandfix Runs an offline scan and fix on the volume.
/freeorphanedchains FAT/FAT32/exFAT only: Frees any orphaned cluster chains instead of recovering their contents.
/markclean FAT/FAT32/exFAT only: Marks the volume clean if no corruption was detected, even if /F was not specified.
The /I or /C switch reduces the amount of time required to run Chkdsk by
skipping certain checks of the volume.
