Last week, I wrote an article on how CHKDSK (Check Disk) reduces your hard disk space. Hope, you got it right that CHKDSK shows reduced space in hard disk for good. It indicates that your hard drive is failing. Today, I am going to drill down a bit more and will tell – how to perform this CHKDSK on Windows 10.
You can run CHKDSK command in two ways:
- Through Command Prompt
- Through Error Checking option in Drive Tools
Through Command Prompt
You’ll need administrator privilege to perform CHKDSK on Windows 10 through Command Prompt. For that, type CMD on Windows search box and right click on Command Prompt desktop app and choose Run as Administrator.
There’s one more method to access Command Prompt with administrator privilege. Press Windows + X to open power users menu. From here, you can choose Command Prompt (Admin) option.
In Command Prompt, type CHKDSK followed by a space, then the letter of the drive you want to check/repair. If you’re not specifying any drive, it’ll take system drive (usually C) by default.
Since here we haven’t specified any parameters along with CHKDSK command, it is displaying only the current status of your drive. You’ve to specify parameters such as “/f /r /x /v” etc. to repair errors present on your drive. You can specify these parameters after specifying the drive letter separated by space.
Each parameter has a specific meaning.
/f: tells CHKDSK to fix errors on the disk
/v: shows the path and name of every file and directory in the disk
/r: locate bad sectors on the drive and recovers readable information
/x: forces the drive to dismount before process starts
If you are using /f parameter, CHKDSK needs to lock the drive before repairing. If it cannot lock the drive, it’ll ask you if you want to perform CHKDSK the next time you boot your computer.
Click “Y” and press enter. CHKDSK will continue when the next time you restart your computer.
Since CHKDSK executes before Windows loads, it’ll get full access to the disk to repair errors on the drive.
Through Error Checking option in Drive Tools
You might be familiar with this tool. To access this, right-click on the drive you want to check and choose properties. Then, click on the “check” option from Tools tab.
Here also, you’ve to access with administrator privilege. If your drive hasn’t any issue, it’ll recommend you “no need to scan the drive”. Otherwise, scan it.
Here’s the summary – you can perform CHKDSK on Windows 10 just as the same way as you did on Windows 7 or 8. But, administrator access is mandatory here. You can either use Command Prompt or use Windows Error Checking tool.
Got any questions, please jot it down in the comment box below.
