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Clay Nichols
Asked: 2016-08-18 14:27:45 +0800 CST

How to automate disk checking in Windows?

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Chkdsk is a very manual, technical solution

Hard Drive checking in Windows reports a lot of unnecessary info, requiring that you read through it the chkdsk report, etc. Also chkdsk can't fix problems on an in-use files (like the Windows drive). It seems like a little thing, but a non-technical user can't understand ChkDsk results and it takes even a technical user a minute to read through the report for each hard drive.

Even if I automated Chkdsk with the /x and /f options, I still have to read the report every day.

Is there a tool or built in service which will:

  1. Automatically check all drives for errors
  2. Report a simple "no problem" or "problem"
  3. Ideally, schedule a repair operation on the next restart.
  4. Bonus points: restart the computer to do the repair, and report all of that.
maintenance chkdsk

2 Answers

  1. There is a system command you can use to mark disk for automated checking on the next reboot:

    FSUTIL dirty set <drive>:

    For instance:

    FSUTIL dirty set c:

    Processing report is available via Event Viewer - System Log.

    If you want an automated checks - put it as a task into Windows Task Scheduler.

    If system founds disk problems it may mark volume as dirty(bad). To query dirty status use:

    FSUTIL dirty query c:

    Note that running FSUTIL require admin rights.

    Alternatively you can adapt this PowerShell script for your needs.

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  2. For automation, you can create a new scheduled task to run a script which checks available volumes and runs chkdsk with appropriate parameters. Results are in Application Event log with "Chkdsk" as source and "26212" as Event Id. You can attach a task to this event and distribute both scheduled tasks with group policy.

    Automating a repair operation and restart is not something I would do. Disk checks on large volumes take a lot of time and that means unpredictable downtime periods. Better to manually start it.

    So, technically, it's possible, but I don't think it's something I would do.

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