In this article I describe how I got one of our Windows machines to actually do a "Fix" after discovering errors on the primary boot disk (C:).
Background:
On Riley's gaming machine (currently running Windows 10) if you run "File Explorer" and then go to "This PC" and "right-click" on the "Windows (C:)" drive and check properties - under "Tools" and "Check" the drive - it was saying that the system found Errors on the drive. I was presented with the option to reboot now and fix the issues or set a flag to fix on the next reboot.
Issue:
When I selected reboot now and fix the drive issues, the system would reboot but when I checked for errors after reboot - the system was in an endless loop of errors and not fixing. It appears the the system does not complete a proper fix. Riley had noticed that the system was running slowly for some games, especially those that had a disk cache set up. Her disk light was constantly on and task manager showed a high level of disk activity.
Resolution:
I ended up trying to complete a chkdsk -f, etc - but nothing would resolve the issues. Note: ChkDsk cannot “fix” the drive as it is the windows drive and is locked from being updated. This may also be the issue when I was rebooting?? So what I did was to get the system to boot in “safe mode”. My theory was that booting into "safe mode" with minimal programs loaded may not lock the drive and allow for the “fix” (probably chkdsk) to run. To do this I ran "msconfig.exe" and under the System tab - selected "Boot into safe mode" and rebooted the machine. This appeared to work. It seems to allow for the system to boot into safe mode and actually execute the disk scan/fix.
During the reboot you will actually see that the system does the drive “fixing” and then boots into safe mode. Afterwards, I checked the drive and did another “Check” and it reported that there are no longer any disk errors that were detected. I then ran “msconfig.exe” again to return the system boot back to not go into safe mode. I then rebooted to normal mode and again re-ran the "Check" utility. It again reported that the were no remaining disk errors detected but just to be sure I re-ran the complete scan and it scanned clean... So all fixed up!! The impacted games no longer had lagging issues and the system disk operations improved.
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