chkdsk is not fixing the errors

You are probably reading this because you have been caught in an endless cycle of trying to have chkdsk fix errors on disk but without success. While it could be that this great and useful utility is indeed failing to fix these errors or you might be experiencing what some fall into, trying to fix errors that actually don’t exist.

Well, here is what you could be experiencing. For some reason you had to run chkdsk in read only mode from Windows to check if there was an error on disk. And the utility reported that Windows found errors. Taking the next logical step, you run chkdsk /f to fix these found errors. You then decide to run chkdsk again in read only mode just to be sure the errors are gone. But chkdsk reports the same error message again at the end of the process. Now you either Google what you are experiencing or you determine that the best and logical thing to do is to run the chkdsk /r to repair the errors hoping that would work. And again you run chkdsk in read only mode only to be surprised that the same error is still being reported. Like us, you probably start to conclude that the chkdsk utility is not fixing the errors and you hit the search engines again. Well, here you are and we are glad to share with you what most likely is happening.

Like us, most likely you are trying to fix errors that don’t exist. Here is how you can determine that for sure:

Clue #1:

When you run chkdsk in read only mode, in Windows, check if the second line from the top says:

The volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk might report errors when no corruption is present.

But you might say that this doesn’t mean that the errors being reported are not real they still might be. That’s why you need to check for the second clue.

Clue #2:

If you run chkdsk with the /f or /f option and it reports no errors then the first error being reported is for sure not real and is being reported due to the disk being accessed by another process as chkdsk warned. Still not convinced? Then why when you run chkdsk in read only mode it reports that there are errors and when running it with the /F or /R options it reports that there are No Errors? There must be something wrong. Which result should you trust? Well, here is how you determine the truth. The fact that chkdsk /f and chkdsk /r run during the boot process when Windows is still asleep (not having any process access the disk while being diagnosed for errors), should make us feel more trusting. If you are running chkdsk in read only mode on the C:\ drive where the OS is installed, Windows will most likely have a process accessing the disk during the diagnostics process which will make chkdsk think there are errors on disk. That’s why chkdsk gives us a warning about this issue by telling us that “The volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk might report errors when no corruption is present.”

Having these two clues in place, one should conclude that what is happening is exactly that chkdsk is warning to be the case that the error is due to the disk being used by another process and that is it.

We hope that this blog post helped you end the long and frustrating diagnostics cycle you were experiencing. We did have this experience while diagnosing a server for a client that we needed to finish sooner than later and we thought to share this to help others get freed sooner as well.

For your convenience we are including the exact error message we were getting from running chkdsk in read only mode:

C:\chkdsk
The type of the file system is NTFS.
The volume is in use by another process. Chkdsk might report errors when no corruption is present.

WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)…
333312 file records processed.
File verification completed.
23345 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
249 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)…
416554 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)…
333312 file SDs/SIDs processed.
Security descriptor verification completed.
41622 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal…
538481088 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
The Volume Bitmap is incorrect.
Windows found problems with the file system.