chkdsk over and over

> From: A Computer User
> Sent: May 13, 2006
> To: Ask Leo!
> Subject: chkdsk over and over
>
> Leo,
> --------------
> My PC is nothing special - an E-Machines W2646. 2.6 GHZ,
> 40G drive, second 20g drive, about a year old. (both
> Seagate), 768 MB RAM, XPSP2. Windows reduced to "standard"
> basic appearance for performance. (Makes a difference!)
>
> For some reason, Windows is suddenly insisting at every
> boot-up that I need to CHKDSK my second hard drive (drive D,
> the titchy 20Gb one) "Needs to be checked for consistency" is
> the wording. Trouble is, if I let it carry on and do its
> stuff, it never seems to find anything wrong or correct
> anything. A separate S.M.A.R.T. program shows nothing
> untoward but Seagate Tools run from a floppy shows a problem
> with the file structure (why, all of a sudden?), although I
> don`t seem to be experiencing any problems accessing the data
> on that drive. I`m a little reluctant to do too much to that
> drive at present, having moved "my documents" folder there
> and a small amount of audio stuff also, although I do
> obviously have back-ups elsewhere. Also, as a matter of
> interest, I`ve moved the paging file there. Is it actually
> broke and do I need to fix it? See the end of the log. Here`s
> what it has to say:
>
> ______________________________________________________________

> ______________________________________________________________
>
> I have tried to run CHKDSK from a command window, but Windows
> won`t do it, as it says it needs exclusive access to some
> files (due to paging file?), and offers to dismount, but
> won`t, offering once more to CHKDSK at boot-up, so I seem to
> be in a bit of a loop! Norton disk doctor does a similar
> thing. Is it worth re-formatting the drive? (After first
> ensuring my back-ups are OK, of course!) What else do I do
> about it, pretty please?

There are a few ways to procede here.

First of all, yes, the fact that the paging file is on the
D: drive is preventing CHKDSK from the command line. In fact,
it'll prevent just about any maintenance utility from working
while Windows is running.

Option 1: move the paging file back to C: - even if you just
do this so you can run "chkdsk /f D:". Hopefully the errors will
be repaired, and you can then reset the paging file to D:.

Other solutions start to get more ... geeky.

Note that I said "while windows is running". That leads to option
2: boot from a standalone CD. If you're at all adventersome, Knoppix
is a stand-alone version of Linux that runs entirely from a CD.
I believe there are disk diagnostic tools included - though it
definitely assumes a level of geekiness :-). So does "BartPE" -
it allows you to create a bootable Windows CD. Creating it is a
little more work, but once done you have a Windows that boots
from CD, and doesn't try to use the hard disk - allowing you to
run the appropriate repair tools on it.

http://www.bootdisk.com/ntfs.htm claims to have a DOS bootable
disk with NTFS support, AND a chkdsk that works on NTFS drives.
I'm ... skeptical ... but it could be worth a try :-).

And finally, there's this:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_21437057.html
which also discusses a possible registry corruption that can
lead to Windows wanting to ChkDsk every time. It's unclear that
it's related, but it could be worth checking out.

Good luck!

Thanks for asking,

Leo