Sysinternals Freeware - Mark Russinovich & Bryce Cogswell

NTFSCHK

Copyright © 1999 Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell
Last Updated: November 28, 1999 v1.0

Introduction

If you're a Windows NT user and are experimenting with Windows 2000 then you almost certainly set up a dual-boot environment. If you did then you experienced the annoyance of Windows 2000 automatically and without warning upgrading your NTFS drives to NTFS version 5. Once that happens you're no longer able to run CHKDSK on those drives from NT 4, which forces you to boot into Windows 2000 to check your drives. Conspiracy? Some people think so. Whatever the case, we have the solution.

We've taken the technology we developed for NTFSDOS Professional and NTFS for Windows 98 and made it possible for you to run the Windows 2000 version of CHKDSK within our run-time environment under NT 4. The program is called NTFSCHK and you simply point it at your Windows 2000 installation and optionally specify a particular NTFS drive that you want it to check. No more booting out of NT 4 to check your NTFS 5 drives!

Using NTFSCHK

You run NTFSCHK by specifying the system directory of your Windows 2000 installation, for example “NTFSCHK c:\winnt5”. By default NTFSCHK will check all your NTFS drives. If you wish to have NTFSCHK check only a specific drive you specify it after the system directory, for instance "NTFSCHK c:\winnt5 d:". Note that unlike standard CHKDSK, NTFSCHK runs in read/write mode - if it detects problems on a drive it will fix them.

Usage: ntfschk [drive letter]

If you've removed Windows 2000 from your system, or for some reason your Windows 2000 installation is not accessible when you are in NT 4, you can still run NTFSCHK if you make the required files available to it. Create a directory while under NT 4 with a subdirectory named "system32" e.g. "c:\win2k\system32". Then copy the following files from a Windows 2000 CD-ROM or the \winnt\system32 directory of a Windows 2000 installation to the system32 directory you created:

To have NTFSCHK use the files you copied just point NTFSCHK at the top directory underwhich you've stored the files e.g. "ntfschk c:\win2k".

Download NTFSCHK.EXE (57KB)

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