A Quick Way To Check Drives In Windows

It may happen at times that Windows crashes or there is a power failure which causes disk drives to lose data (doesn’t happen frequently fortunately).

There is a quick way to check whether a select drive or a set of drives are ok after a crash or an abnormal Windows restart.

This is done through a command prompt utility called fsutil.

1.Open command prompt as Administrator and type the following :
fsutil dirty query <drive letter>

The above image shows that drive D was checked for integrity and was found to be alright through the dirty command.

Suppose you still are not satisfied and want to force a check on any Windows drive on next restart not right now, that too is possible by setting the specified drive as dirty and hence needing a check.

To do this, the syntax is as follows :
fsutil dirty set <drive letter>

What this will do is scan the drive on next Windows restart for any errors since the drive is marked as dirty and needs to be checked.

Note : fsutil works very well on NTFS volumes but no that well on FAT32 volumes.

Happy disk checking.