How to prevent CHKDSK from starting upon bootup in Windows
Sometimes you need to check the health of your hard drives by running a diagnostic on them, but you cannot fix any problems because “the system cannot get exclusive access to the drive”. This problem occurs more frequently on the drive in which Windows is installed.
So, you schedule CHKDSK to run before boot (or sometimes Windows will schedule it), and it either takes friggin’ forever, or tries to run a CHKDSK every time you boot! The problem is that a flag has been set on your drive and isn’t being cleared after a successful run. There is a simple procedure to correct this problem, but you have to go through a few screens in Vista or XP to do it.
- Click the Start Button. From the Start menu click Run
- In the Run dialogue box type: cmd. The command prompt window will now open
- In the command prompt window type: fsutil dirty query c: (If you have a dual boot system then replace the C: drive letter with the relevant drive letter you have been having problems with). Press Enter.
- The response from the file system utility will probably be that the disk is ‘dirty’
- Now type: CHKNTFS /X C: into the command prompt windows and press Enter. (If you have a dual boot system then replace the C: drive letter with the relevant drive letter you have been having problems with). The X parameter, in this case, tells windows not to check the disk in question
- Re-boot your PC. You should now find that CHKDSK does not run on the selected drive
The different commands to check your drive status and stop CHKDSK - Once you have confirmed that CHKDSK does not run and your PC has fully booted click Start>Run again and type cmd.
- In the command window now type: chkdsk /f /r c: and press Enter. Again replace the C: (If you have a dual boot system then replace the C: drive letter with the relevant drive letter you have been having problems with)
- After the drive has been scanned type: fsutil dirty query c: and press Enter
- Windows should now confirm that the ‘dirty bit’ has been disabled
8 Comments
Run cmd as Administrator
You usually get a "drive is locked" message on the drive where Windows is installed (usually C:). You say "yes" to a scheduled disk check and the system will run CHKDSK on the next system boot.
Aslam-Alaikum
After I type chkdsk f r c: in step 8, I get the following:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot lock current drive.
Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by an another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts
Could you please advise the next course of action.
After I put in the command "fsuftil…" I get an error message saying I don't have administration authority. WTF?
I'm the only person who uses this computer and it's a home version.
works fine now thank you
I checked a box that says to run CHKDSK upon startup. Now when it has finished the CHKDSK and ask for my password upon reboot, it goes right back to CHKDSK.
I can't/don't know how to get to the START->RUN command box from this reboot.
Help!
(Dell Dimension 8300 running XP Professional)
Thanks! it worked.
My machine runs CHKDSK on boot, it comes up clean then reboots and runs it again (and again …!). It never boots into Windows XP unless I manually abort CHKDSK. When I ran "fsutil dirty query c:" it came back "Drive C: is NOT DIRTY". I then ran "CHKNTFS /X C:" and it STILL ran/runs chkdsk. I really don't know what to do next.