Chkdsk runs at boot time

And here we are again. I had another problem lately. Something that, again, haven’t seen before. Yes I know, I have LOTS of things not seen before. Why you telling me YOU have seen all of them??

Well, anyways, I had a computer that was constantly doing scandisk at start up. I ran scandisk. Nothing. I ran defrag. Nothing. I downloaded a freeware to scan the disk. Nothing. Oh by the way the program is called Active Hard Disk Monitor from LSoft Technologies Inc. (www.ntfs.com).

I didn’t know what the heck was going on! I read in one webpage that there must be a “dirt” thingy in the drive that causes this problem. “OK”, I said, “let me give a try the following command”.

I opened a command prompt window (with cmd) and typed in “fsutil dirty query d:”, without the brackets, where d: was the drive with the problems. I got an answer that the drive was dirty. “OK”, I said again, “I’ll bring the cleaners to clean it up. No? Won’t work? Something else you say?”.

After erasing that thought from my mind I tried the following command:

chkdsk d: /f /x

It said that the check disk can’t run because the drive can’t be unmounted due to a program using it! What the heck??? Which bloody program? The antivirus was off, no visible activity there! What’s going on?

I remembered then that each drive may have VIRTUAL MEMORY assigned to it. By default only the C drive has, well in mine at least! So I right clicked My Computer, Properties, Advanced, Performance Settings, Advance, Change and voila, the D drive has virtual memory assigned to it. One second after the option for the drive to have virtual memory was unchecked.

Ran the chkdsk command and, you guessed it, no complaints. The procedure ended very quickly. Ran again the fsutil dirty query d: command and the drive was NOT DIRTY ANYMORE! And that was it. Hope this will help you too, o traveler of the weird place called internet.