All modern and not-so-modern Windows versions include their own built-in tools to check the health of our disks and correct errors in them: ” chkdsk ” or error checking tool.
How to use chkdsk in Windows to fix errors in your disk
If you use Windows 8 or Windows 10, you may never have to use this tool on your own, since in the versions after Windows 7, the system does it for you, checking for damaged sectors or other errors during the automatic maintenance, and if you have a hard drive, Windows 10 even performs defragmentation for you.
Now, depending on what version of Windows you use, and the circumstances, you may ever need to use this tool, it may happen that your disk has errors after incorrectly turning off the computer, or because of some software or corrupted data.
How to check errors in a unit
- Open Windows Explorer and go to the path where your storage units are located, ie “Computer” or “This computer”.
- Right click on the unit you wish to review and then click Properties.
- In the next window, select the Tools tab and right in the first section, click on the ” Check “ button for Windows to find out if there are file system errors in that unit.
- The process is the same for any unit, you can even do it with external drives or pen drives.
- The next thing is to simply wait for the check to finish, depending on the size of the disk, the space it has full, the speed of your computer and other factors, it can take minutes to hours.
In fact, in Windows 8 and Windows 10, once you click, the tool will once tell you if it has detected errors during its automatic checks, but you can start a manual check if you wish.
If the tool detects an error in the file system, you will need to restart the computer or schedule a restart in order to solve them.
You can also carry out this process even more simply by entering a command in the terminal or command prompt, as long as you have administrator permissions:
For example, you can do so by opening a PowerShell as Administrator and pasting the command chkdsk /f C:.
You can substitute “C:” for the letter of the unit you wish to review. To run chkdsk from the terminal you must restart the computer at that moment, or program the check at the next restart . This includes the two steps in one, check and correct the errors at once.
