Chkdsk issue

Hi, so I recently upgraded to windows 10 from windows 7 and it was working fine for a week. However a few hours ago, the system prompted me to restart to scan disk for errors. I restart, windows does a scan and gets stuck at 59%.

I let it run for 6 hours and there was still no progress so I decided to do a force restart. I assume it just performs a chkdsk but restarting doesn't give me the option to skip it. Doing another force restart makes it go into system recovery mode. After the "diagnosing your pc" stage, it says "repairing disk errors. this might take over and hour to complete." so I cannot access the recovery options either.

Using the boot media I used to install windows 10 in the first place, I ran recovery options, but system restore can't detect the drive and the command prompt is mounted on X:\ instead of C:\ so I assume the recovery media is running independent of my main boot drive.

I assume windows scheduled a chkdsk without the /f flag but now I have no way of booting into windows to correct that. I know my installation is fine because I just rebooted from it several hours ago to do the dskchk.

I really don't want to reset my pc just because chkdsk can't complete so I'd like to know if there is a way to:

1. Skip or cancel chkdsk from boot
2. Get into recovery options without going through automatic repair
3. Use the recovery media to mess with the current installation drive (and hopefully remove the scheduled chkdsk from startup)

Thanks in advance!

Hi there. Welcome to the forums.

You may want to try the first few posts/tutorials here: Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk

They have various tools on them. It helped me in the past.

HippsieGypsie said:

Hi there. Welcome to the forums.

You may want to try the first few posts/tutorials here: Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk

They have various tools on them. It helped me in the past.

Thank you! That is exactly what I needed.

For anyone else that encounters a similar issue, here's how I solved it:

1. Download the bootable rescue disk mentioned and use a tool such as Rufus to create a bootable drive with the .iso file
2. Boot into the drive, which has a number of recovery utilities already built in
3. To remove the scheduled chkdsk at boot, run 'regedit'
4. Select HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and go to File -> Load Hive
5. Navigate to your original windows installation drive and go to Windows/System32/config
6. Select System.dat then enter any Key name
7. Open the created folder(the name you entered)
8. Navigate to CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager and doubleclick the BootExecute Value
9. Replace everything with "autocheck autochk *"
10. Reboot the system and boot to your normal device.
11. If dskchk still runs, you will have 8 seconds to cancel it.

topgundcp said:

IMO, It is normal that chkdsk on your HD seems to stall at time trying to repair a bad spot and register it in MFT table so Windows will avoid using it. I have seen cases that it would take over a day to complete so 6 hours is nothing. Just let it run untill completion.

Download CrystalDiskInfo6_3_2.zip - CrystalDiskInfo - SourceForge.JP , unzip and run to check if your HD is healthy. If there's some warning about bad sector(s) then it's time to replace it, no software can fix if you have a hardware problem.

Ah, I assumed that windows 10 had scheduled a chkdsk without an /f flag and might not fix the errors. When I wanted to go change that, I found myself unable to boot into windows 10 at all because the recovery options also performed a chkdsk.

Arc said:

To skip or cancel chkdsk on boot, you may press any key on the keyboard within 10 seconds for that time being. You have to do it for all the volumes/partitions of the HDD.

I believe because windows scheduled it automatically, I wasn't given the option to skip the chkdsk. After editing the registry through the bootable rescue disk, I was presented with the option to skip and an 8 second timer as would be expected of a normal boot.

Thanks once again for your help guys!

isaacntk said:

Thanks once again for your help guys!

Your quite welcome. Glad we could help.

I'm curious to know if there was indeed something wrong with the disk. Please let us know?

HippsieGypsie said:

Your quite welcome. Glad we could help.

I'm curious to know if there was indeed something wrong with the disk. Please let us know?

I don't doubt that there are indeed issues with my disk. Just that I thought chkdsk would have worked faster and after 6 hours I assumed it had hit a dead end. But whatever the issues are, they aren't causing any problems, windows still boots normally and I've yet to encounter any data loss. Won't push my luck though so I'll probably let it run again for a full day if needed, but at a better time.

topgundcp said:

What you did there was bypassing chkdsk so I don't think your problem was solved. What you might want to do is to delay the count down time to skip chkdsk by going to the registry and change the value of AutoChkTimeout to a value such as 10 seconds so you can skip chkdsk within 10 seconds by pressing the <ESC> key.
the entry is under: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

Of course, your Windows will boot and run normally unless Windows tries to use those bad spots then BSOD/abnormal behaviour can happen.

I would suggest to run chkdsk /r C: before you go to bed, let it run over night.

I found some time to do a chkdsk. Instead of running it through boot, I decided to do it through the bootable rescue disk. 12 Hours in, I'm at stage 5 - I think. There's some issue with the printing. I can run it as long as I need for now, but a quick calculation of the rate its going (~50 sectors/files/clusters? idk what the unit is) per second, about 37 million more to go, It seems it should complete in about 8.7 days. I'll leave it till tomorrow night to see if the rate improved. The ETA is hovering around 1 hour and 40 mins, but the seconds don't count down.