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My Lenovo Z50 laptop has been giving me problems, so I set it to run CHKDSK /f /r /x when I rebooted.

Several hours later, it's stuck at 12%. The dots are circling, so I suspect I should let it finish except for a few issues:

1) Some people have let theirs run for days, and I can't wait that long.

2) It may be stuck rather than just slow. (I've seen cases where dots continue to circle even if the process has actually frozen.) Since it's on the reboot screen, it doesn't show progress.

On the other hand, interrupting CHKDSK can cause hard drive damage. On the other other hand, I don't know how to interrupt it other than powering off the computer.

When is it reasonable to shut it down, and how to do so safely?

(I saw two similar questions on SuperUser, but they don't actually answer my questions.)

EDIT: I let it run overnight. In the morning there was a blue screen reading "Automatic Repair Failed". I clicked "Shut Down"; tonight I'll try to repair it.

EDIT 2: @Davidgo says don't try to repair it; the drive is failing. Okay, but before I ran CHKDSK I got a bluescreen error with the stop code "Memory Management". This was the second time in the past week. Does my laptop actually have two problems?

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  • interrupting CHKDSK can cause hard drive damage I think it's a tale. Interrupting until 100% checking is safe - CHKDSK reads and analyzes data only. The problems can occur if you interrupt it in the stage when all data is collected and analized, and CHKDSK alters disk structures, but this process is very fast (few seconds or ever less), it's difficult to have time to interrupt it.
    – Akina
    Jul 12, 2018 at 6:46
  • How long did you let it set at 12%??? You are best to let it set overnight, it may be correcting serious errors and scanning each sector and will take time depending on the size of the hard drive, no, do not power down. I hope you have a back up of critical data.
    – Moab
    Jul 12, 2018 at 20:09
  • Please don't try repair it again tonight. Your hard drive is dying. Get a new drive, do as best a bit copy as you can (If you have the ability, try use something like DDRescue from a USB disk), then do the chkdsk on the bit copy on the new drive. (The more you try read/repair/use the old drive the harder it will be to recover data off it.
    – davidgo
    Jul 12, 2018 at 20:59
  • @davidgo Okay. But to do the bit copy, the old drive has to run for at least a little while, correct? Also, please see my new question above. Jul 12, 2018 at 22:12
  • Its possible your system has multiple problems, but it could also be (and I suspect its more likely that) there is corruption on the hard drive so that programs/drivers are corrupt and misbehaving. I would really focus on fixing the drive issue first, then on any secondary issue.
    – davidgo
    Jul 12, 2018 at 22:18

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