Check hard drive on Windows XP computer

Question

I'm trying to test a hard drive (C:) on a Windows XP computer for bad sectors. When I run Chkdsk, I'm informed of the following:

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process.

If I reboot I can get chkdsk to run on boot up, but then I'm unable to see the results because the computer restarts. I tried to pipe the results to a text file, but to no avail.

How can I configure chkdsk? Or is there some other free software I might be able to use?

Answer 1

You should be able to run CHKDSK if you have a Windows XP CD. Just boot to that CD and when prompted enter the Windows Recovery Console. Log into your Windows partition. You should now be able to run CHKDSK because you are not using the OS that is on the HDD you are running CHKDSK on.

Note: Before attempting the above, you must first enter the BIOS to make sure that the boot sequence is set so that the CD drive boot before the hard drive.

Answer 2

Your could probably be to create a scheduled task that edits the autocheck registry key to automatically check all drives on reboot, then resets the key (otherwise, autochk will run on every reboot). The reg key is:

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager

Under that is a string value. The default is:

BootExecute = autocheck autochk *

The asterisk means that no drives are being checked on start-up. I'd suggest you read this before doing anything. Hope this will help you.