Repeated chkdsk at startup

[bigal.nz]

Hello,

My friend has a PC which repeated (probably mroe than half the time) runs chkdsk at startup.

I have run a surface scan, no errors and smart data shows all ok. He states he always shuts the machine down in a 'tidy' fashion, its running XP.

I am wonderng what else might be causing chkdsk to run?

Cheers

-Al

[Vulcan]

Windows problems are off-topic for the forum, so I won't spend long on this, but here are a few thoughts. If you do a Google search for something like:

Code:

chkdsk OR autochk every boot OR start

you'll see that this is quite a common problem, with a variety of causes.

If I was in your position and able to ask questions to the owner of the system, I would start by applying 2 troubleshooting techniques (although there are others which could also be used):

a) I appreciate that the problem is intermittent, but if it hasn't been there since day 1 on this system, when did the problem first start? Then figure out what changed just before the problem was first seen, and investigate that further.

b) There must be something different happening between those times when a reboot results in autochk running (which looks like chkdsk), and those times when the reboot is normal and autochk does not run. I would ask the owner to try to identify what is happening differently, in terms of what they do, how they use the system, what programs they run etc., between those 2 cases, to see if they can find an correlation between running program X or performing action Y etc. and autochk running on the next boot.

Also check the Windows event logs for any interesting entries which occur (or do not occur) only when the reboot runs autochk.

There may be Windows-specific tests which can be done as well (e.g. are the reboots always "normal" if the PC is booted into safe mode), but as I said, that would be going off-topic.

Hope that gives you some ideas