Scheduled Chkdsk won't run at reboot

I was using Diskeeper and I wanted to do a defrag job at reboot, and I also checked the box saying, "Run chkdsk.exe before defragmentation" or something like that. For some reason, after I restarted my laptop, the chkdsk program didn't run, it took me straight to windows. Then I tried to defrag normally but diskeeper said something about Chkdsk was scheduled to run, and it cannot defrag my computer until chkdsk ran first. I looked all over the internet for solutions and have tried most of them but I have no luck. I tried to disable chkdsk from being scheduled, but that doesn't work. I also tried to manually run chkdsk from the system32 folder, but it would just stop running half way through. I don't know what to do! If someone have the solutions to this, please let me know! thanks!

 

Normally, when you go to a command prompt in Windows XP and type "chkdsk /r" without the quotation marks it will tell you that the drive is locked and ask if you'd like to run chkdsk at boot up. Then you'd hit "Y" to accept that, and then reboot and chkdsk would start automatically.

If that isn't working, you could attempt to run chkdsk from Safe Mode.

If that still doesn't work, you can boot from your Windows CD and choose to run the Recovery Console. From there you can run "chkdsk /r" manually as well. If it fails at that point, I'd be at a loss to explain it, except to consider corruption of your partition(s) or actual hard drive problems.

Assuming you can get chkdsk to run from one of those places, it should clear the scheduled chkdsk task, so that your defrag will work correctly.

 

generally speaking, Joe's third suggestion is your best bet (run from recovery console)

Many times, I have run into cases where chkdsk is unable to fix a corrupted file system when run from the volume that is corrupted. Sometimes running from the recovery console succeeds where all else fails (or even mounting the drive in a different pc as a slave and running chkdsk on it)

As a temporary measure, diskkeeper will not run because your computer's "dirty bit" is set to check the disk. You can clear this by going to
start > run
<enter>

type
chkntfs c: /d
<enter>
(where c: is your windows drive letter)

You would then be able to defrag.

However, running defrag on a corrupted volume does have some risk involved.

It may be that your drive is failing and this is an early warning sign.

 

I actually solved the problem, I looked more around google and someone suggested "chkdsk/x" and then go to msconfig and set it so that when I restart, it will restart straight to safemode. It worked, and now I can defrag again! Thanks for the replies guys. I've checked your suggestions before with the chkdsk/r but it didn't work.

 

so, just for clarification

can you complete a chkdsk now?

chkdsk /x simply force dismounts a non-system volume--it should not make any difference with your main OS disk

 

i had the same problem with chkdsk, in that it doesn't start before windows like it says it will when i schedule one. it worked once but i keep getting alerts when i open windows mail that a file is corrupted and i need to run chkdsk. i tried to do a restore for another issue but it said i had to run chkdsk because c: was corrupted.

im not a noob in general but i am with vista. i havent tried the console from recovery disc YET but if i do the /x option and unmount, do i risk messing something up? i hate that dell did it but my HD is partitioned in 2 parts. a primary C, recovery D and in disk management i see a 72 mb eisa config (whatever that is) and 2.5g "healthy partition" w/o a letter either.

would i risk messing this up if i use the /x option? i almost did it once but the explanation sounded daunting... and should i keep this recovery partition? i mean if i ever have to ditch this and reload vista, why not just repartition to a full drive and use the CD? am i missing something here? im more desktop savvy than laptop savvy.

thanks!

 

I am also having the same problem where chkdsk won't run at startup (and that's true whether I boot normally or boot into Safe Mode).

I then booted from the recovery disk and got to the command prompt where I was able to run chkdsk, but when I tried to run chkdsk /r the response was that the disk was locked (so chkdsk /r didn't run).

Now what? How do I unlock the disk?

Thanks.

 

Oh, forget to say: I have Vista (32-bit) Ultimate.