chkdsk on boot drive won't run at startup

I am trying to image my boot hard drive in order to migrate the data to an ssd. The backup software (Macrium Reflect) first checks the file system, but reports an "MFT corrupt error", and indicates to run chkdsk c: /r to fix the issue. I opened power shell and attempted to run chkdsk c: /r, but of course as its a boot drive, it says it can't lock the drive and do I want to have chkdsk run after the next re-start. I indicate Yes, and then restart the PC. As expected, during boot up I get a message saying the disk check will run in like 10 seconds and it counts down. The count down reaches zero and a message indicates that it is starting the scan and repair process. However, after a few seconds, the screen goes black and a normal Windows reboot occurs. I have tried running this over ten times with various combinations of chkdsk c: /f /r /x and the result is almost always the same. Only one time did it actually start to scan the disk, but as it is a lengthy process I let it run overnight and the next morning windows 10 had restarted. I went to check the event log to see what chkdsk had done, and there was no log, almost as if it stopped and rebooted without finishing the chkdsk process.

I am running Windows 10, version 2004, OS Build 19041.685, installed 11/20/2020. The PC is a Dell XPS 8300 with a core i-5 processor and 8 GB of RAM. The hard drive is a 1 TB drive.

Messages on this forum indicated that there was a similar problem in the early 2017 time frame after a Windows update, but that it was fixed in the next release.

Any suggestions on how to solve this are appreciated.

Please boot your computer with Windows Setup Media and from Windows Recovery Environment start the Command Prompt.

Please type below command into Command Prompt and press Enter key.

Following command will fixes errors on the disk and locates bad sectors and recovers readable information.

Code:

Chkdsk D: /r

Please replace partition letter D: with Windows installed partition letter. When computer boots into Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) environment the drive letter assign to Windows partition may not be C: drive letter because Windows 7, 8 , 8.1 and 10 creates a separate system partition when it's installed from scratch. The system partition contains boot files WinRE assigns the system partition the C: drive letter and the Windows installed partition will be assign any other drive letter usually D: drive letter is assign to Windows installed partition. The Bcdedit | find "osdevice" command can be use to find out the drive letter of the Windows installed partition the output of the Bcdedit command is similar to this osdevice partition=D:. The drive letter after partition= is the drive letter of the Windows partition.