Command line control Hard disk options, switches, settings under Windows 10/8/7



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Check Disk or Chkdsk.exe is an integrated Windows utility that is used to check for disk and file system errors. If you encounter problems ranging from blue screens to being unable to open or save files or folders, you can run the Scan Disk utility. Whenever we need to detect and repair a file system or hard disk corruption, we run the built-in Windows Check Disk Tool. The Check Disk or ChkDsk.exe utility checks for file system errors, bad sectors, lost clusters and so on. Check Disk can be run automatically during a crash or when the file system is detected as’dirty’.

We can say that there are two versions of this utility in Windows 10/8/7 and Windows Vista. One is the basic version that most of us use and the other is the command line version that has more options. The basic version of the Check Disk utility is accessible as follows: Open Computer > Right Click Drive > Properties > Tools Tab > Check Now. Here you have options to Automatically repair file system errors and Scan for And Attempt Recovery Of Bad Sectors.

You may need to program the chkdsk to restart when the scanner is running.

Control diskette command line

And then there is this command line version of chkdsk, which offers you several options, besides the fact that you can set up regular control of the hard disk with the task scheduler.

To use the command line version, open a command prompt with the’Run as administrator’ option. Type chkdsk at the command prompt. This will launch Chkdsk in read-only mode and display the current player status.

Enter chkdsk /? 12 and press Enter to get its settings or switches.

To get a report for, for example, drive C, use chkdsk c : .

You can also use the following parameters at the end of the order to specialize its operations.

The following applies to volumes FAT32 / NTFS.

/f Corrects errors detected.

/r Identifies defective sectors and attempts to recover information.

/v Displays a list of all files in each directory on FAT32. Cleaning messages are displayed on NTFS.

The following information applies only to NTFS volumes .

/c Skip the cycle scan within the folder structure.

/I Performs a simpler check of index entries.

/x Force volume removal. In addition, all open file handles become invalid. This should be avoided in Windows desktop editions due to possible data loss or corruption.

/l[:size] It changes the size of the file that records NTFS transactions. This option, like the one above, is for server administrators ONLY.

Note that only two switches may be available at boot time in the Windows recovery environment.

/p It performs a complete check of the current disk.

/r It repairs possible damage to the current hard disk.

The following switches only work in Windows 10, Windows 8 on NTFS volumes :

/scan Run online scan

/forceofflinefix Bypass online repair and queue error for offline repair. Must be used with /scan.

/perf Scan as soon as possible.

/spotfix Perform a one-time repair in offline mode.

/offlinescancanandfix Perform offline scanning and make corrections.

/sdcclean Waste collection.

These switches are only supported for Windows 10 to FAT/FAT32/exFAT volumes:

/free orphan strings Free orphan cluster strings

/markclean Mark clean volume if no damage is detected.

Cancel a CHKDSK scan

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To cancel a programmed scan , at a command prompt, type

and press Enter. Here d is the letter of the reader.

Windows 10/8 users may have noticed that disk error checking is slightly different from previous versions of Windows. Read this article on disk error checking in Windows to learn more.

This article on formatting the external disk or running Check Disk with the command prompt may interest some of you.



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