How can I force a disk check when Windows 7 reports "Disk checking has been cancelled"?

Question

I have scheduled a disk check on my C drive. It can't check the disk immediately, because it is in use, so it schedules the disk check for the next reboot. However, when I dutifully reboot, the disk check doesn't happen.

I found some instructions telling me to run msconfig and force a reboot in Safe Mode. When I did this (and scheduled another disk check), I got the following message: Disk checking has been cancelled.

How can I force the disk check to actually, you know, check?

Answer 1

Via http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/71175-disk-check-has-been-canceled-reboot-3.html

1. Make sure you're going to reboot in Normal Mode. Reboot.
2. Hit F8 over and over as soon as your boot up screen appears. (The computer one, which appears before the Windows one.)
3. This will take you to a DOS-like screen. Select Repair Recovery Manager. (You may be prompted to log in as an administrator user so that you can access the Command Prompt.)
4. Form the Repair Recover Manager, select Command Prompt. This will start a command prompt window in the X: drive.
5. Enter C: to switch to the C drive.
6. Enter chkdsk /f (or chkdsk /r)
7. When asked to force a dismount, enter Y
8. The disk will now be checked.
9. Note the results and close the command prompt. (Mine couldn't save the results to the logfile, because it was on the C drive. Not a train smash.)
10. Reboot.

Answer 2

According to Microsoft support, to check if your disk check schedule is really set to make a scan on the next boot (after running CHKDSK /F /R command), you can look on Windows registry. This key (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\BootExecute) should have the entry:

autocheck autochk * /r\DosDevice\C:

If it is just autocheck autochk *, then the schedule is disabled and you will need to run the CHKDSK /F /R, or manually change your registry with to include the /r\DosDevice\C argument.

Answer 3

I have found that above technique still fails to chkdsk the disk, so I used another bootable Windows7 to run chkdsk on this disk.

This could be a bootable CD/DVD of Windows7 as a rescue disk, or Windows 7 on a completely separate physical machine, or Windows 7 running as a virtual machine.

Connect the source Windows 7 as a new storage Harddrive:

• for CD/DVD. just boot the machine with the CD/DVD and follow above prompts
• for physical machine, connect original Hard-drive into the new machine and boot the "rescue" machine and follow above prompts
• for virtual machine, connect the above Windows 7 as a Hardrive storage and boot the virtual machine, and follow prompts above.