Check Disk Says Volume is Clean

Question

I ran check disk today, on a Windows x64 machine on an NTFS disk:

chkdsk /f /r

When it was finished, it says the volume is clean.

What does this mean? I've never seen this screen before when I run check disk. The same "volume is clean" message appeared once before, but I didn't tell check disk to run.

I assumed it had to do with the dual boot I had(Linux/Windows). Is this a bad thing for my hard drive?

Answer 1

Nope, you're not done checking your hard drive. You're getting some bad advice. This applies to chkdsk, surface scan, error checking, etc. when you select the options to recover bad sectors. There are two things that may happen here:

1) When you get the message "volume clean" it ONLY means it checked that small area on your hard drive called, "system reserved". And when you hit a key, it boots normally, but you have NOT done a surface scan or checkdisk. The key here is that it happens within seconds of your reboot.

2) If your chkdsk briefly shows it's checking and then quickly goes to a normal boot, it actually repaired or cleaned the area in system reserved.

In either of the two instances it did not do a full check on your disk. It needs to have a clean system reserve to save data while it does a full scan.

Once one of the two items above has been noted, you need to once again do a chkdsk, and you will find the normal one or two hour scan. Most people don't notice the two items above because they have to be watching the screen... usually they start the scan and walk off.

What I can't answer is why sometimes it will halt so to tell you the area is clean. I have some guesses, but they are probably wrong.

Regardless you need to run it again and expect it to run for a long time. I also might add, that "sometimes" but very seldom, it does a partial clean and requires you to clean it again. There is no prompt telling you this, as what you should be doing, and most people don't, is go into the Administrative Tools and then find the Event Viewer and look at the results of the scan from the "Application Log" of the event viewer. You search for the latest "Wininit" log and read it.

The bottom line if you see the words, "volume clean" you have fixed NOTHING. You need to run it again. This app, regardless what Microsoft calls it with each version is not fully automatic and takes a little work on your part to be sure you performed a good surface scan of your hard drive.

Answer 2

I also experienced it. My aging power supply SMPS box was culprit it overcooked and corrupted RAM. Windows load up became impossible, or sluggish. Wouldn't repair windows system finally conked. HDD kept running auto Chkdsk deleting Index entries. It was wild. Changed SMPS and burnt RAM. Tried Scheduled Disk Check on bootup from tools. It ended without check in 30 seconds with Volume is clean message. Now running full check after scheduling chkdsk from CMD on bootup. I need format drive reinstall windows now. A clean windows install needed to remove all system breakdowns.