Unfortunately, this way, you don??™t get the detailed report. And when Windows
won??™t start, the Command Prompt interface is basically your only choice.
Dirty drives and automatic scans
When a volume is marked ???dirty,??? Windows scans it with Chkdsk automatically
during the boot process. A drive can become dirty if it??™s in use when
Windows crashes, or Chkdsk schedules a scan when you attempt to check a
disk that is in use. A drive not considered dirty is marked ???clean??? (no surprise
there).
You can use the Fsutil (Fsutil.exe) utility to manage dirty drives. Open a
Command Prompt window and type fsutil (without any arguments) to display
a list of commands that can be used with the tool. As you might have
expected, the dirty command is the one that??™s most relevant here. Here??™s
how it works:
Crashes and Error Messages | 297
Troubleshooting
To see whether drive G: is currently marked as dirty, type:
fsutil dirty query g:
To mark drive H: as dirty, so it will be scanned by Chkdsk the next time
Windows starts, type:
fsutil dirty set h:
Fsutil has been found to be unreliable when used on FAT or
FAT32 drives, so you may wish to use it only on more modern
NTFS disks. (See ???Choose the Right Filesystem??? in
Chapter 5.)
Another utility, Chkntfs, is used to choose whether or not Windows runs
Chkdsk automatically at Windows startup, regardless of the so-called cleanliness
of the drive. (It is not used to check NTFS drives, as its name implies,
however.
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