How to Fix Hard Disk Errors in PC?

Hard disk errors have been bothering many people out there. Even at this age, Windows 10 users still get errors like ‘Windows detected a hard disk problem’. The cause of hard disk errors could be virus attack, false operation, drive/disk failure, registry error, file system damaging, bad sectors etc. If any of these hard disk/drive errors arise in your PC, Windows will prompt a warning. It will ask you to ‘Start the backup process’ to backup all your personal files. There could be a chance that you can lose all your data if the disk fails before next warning.

Note: It is recommended that your backup your personal files first then perform the fixing hard disk operations.

How to Fix Hard Disk Errors

In case of fixing errors in a hard disk, Check disk command in Windows could be a lifesaver. Check disk (Chkdsk) is a command which can help scanning the hard disk and fixing issues. This can be done via command prompt or using Windows inbuilt feature. Let’s us look at both options in detail.

Checking Hard Disk Using Windows Inbuilt Feature

Windows users find this method easy and the time saving also. Instead of going through typical command prompt, you just have to perform few steps and that’s all:

Step 1: Double-click on ‘This PC’ from the desktop to open it.

Step 2: Inside the ‘This PC’, right-click on ‘Local disk C:’ then go to ‘Properties’. In our case, we are performing the error-check on ‘C-drive’ because our Windows is installed on C drive.

Step 3: Switch the tab to ‘Tools’ and there you’ll see the ‘Error-checking’ section.

Step 4: Click on the ‘Check’ button. Windows will prompt a popup for ‘Error checking (Local Disk (C:))’. It might say ‘you don’t need to scan this drive’ because there are no errors. But, you can still be able to perform the scan on that drive. It’s your choice.

Step 5: Click on ‘Scan drive’ and Windows will start the scanning. It may take some time to scan the drive and check for the problems. After that, it will start fixing them.

Step 6: Just click on ‘Close’, if no errors are found after the scan. You can also check the details of that scan by clicking on ‘Show Details’ link.

Checking Hard Disk From Windows Command Prompt

This will be a command line method in which you have to enter a command in command prompt (or Windows PowerShell) to perform error checking of the hard disk.

Step 1: Click on ‘Start menu’ and type ‘Command prompt’.

Step 2: Right click on the ‘Command Prompt’ option and click on ‘Run as administrator’.   It is necessary to run command prompt as an administrator else ‘Chkdsk’ command will not work.

Windows will ask you to allow this application to make changes. Click on ‘Yes’ and It will open the CMD for you.

Step 3: Type a command ‘Chkdsk C: /F /R /X’ and hit ‘Enter’ key from the keyboard.

/F: This means fixing the errors on the disk.

/R: This means locate bad sectors and recover readable information.

/X: This forces the volume to first dismount it, if necessary.

It will say ‘Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use’. It will ask you to schedule the disk checking operation at next restart.

Step 4: Press ‘Y’ and hit ‘Enter’ key. Now, the disk checking has been scheduled.

When you are going to restart PC again, it will start checking and fixing the errors/issues. After that, your Windows will boot up normally.