Windows XP in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Name

Chkdsk — \windows\system32\chkdsk.exe

Synopsis

Check the disk for errors and fix any that are found (replaces Scandisk).

To Open

Command Prompt → chkdsk

Usage

chkdsk [drive[filename]] [/f] [/r] [/x] [/i] [/c] [/v]

Description

Chkdsk scans the disk surface, checks the integrity of files and folders, and looks for lost clusters (among other things), correcting any problems that are found and sometimes even freeing disk space consumed by unusable fragments of data.

If you run Chkdsk with no command-line parameters, it will check the current drive for errors. Or, specify a drive letter to check a specific drive, like this:

chkdsk e:

However, Chkdsk run this way will only report problems—it won’t correct them. The report you’ll get looks something like this:

The type of the file system is NTFS. Volume label is Hard Disk. WARNING! F parameter not specified. Running CHKDSK in read-only mode. CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)... File verification completed. CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)... Index verification completed. CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)... Security descriptor verification completed. Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap. Windows found problems with the file system. Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these. 29302528 KB total disk space. 2997136 KB in 19467 files. 5132 KB in 1320 indexes. 0 KB in bad sectors. 94368 KB in use by the system. 65536 KB occupied by the log file. 26205892 KB available on disk. 4096 bytes in each ...