For whatever reason; your Windows PC’s power was cut off and your machine’s operation was halted while it was being used. When you switch it back on and boot it up; everything appears normal at first, but as time goes by you start to notice a number of anomalies: Maybe a file appears as present on your hard-drive, but Windows says the file doesn’t exist when you click it. Maybe your automatic online backup program stops and advises you of errors where there should be none, and asks to try again. Perhaps you’re in the middle of something, and suddenly your computer blue-screens: All this happens from the time the power was cut; though everything was fine before that… And the situation appears to steadily be deteriorating, as another file becomes inaccessible and the blue-screen of another stop-error occurs as the machine comes to another dead halt.

At this point intervention is required; otherwise your computer will eventually become unusable.

What happened?

When the power was unexpectedly cut, Windows may have been writing a vital system file to disk and hadn’t finished writing it: Maybe it was making an entry in the drive’s Master Boot Record, and the sudden power-outage caused corruption of the volume bitmap? Maybe the head jumped and caused an error in the disk’s filing system, or corrupted another file? Whatever may have happened; there’s one thing you can be sure of: Your hard-drive needs immediate attention before matters come to a head and Windows eventually refuses to boot.

If you have more than one hard-drive; be that more than one physical hard drive unit, or two or more partitions on a single physical drive, or a combination of the two; you’re going to have to attend to all drives, one at a time. – Starting with the C: drive.

Here is what you need to do: -

Get to a command-prompt somehow. Usually you’ll be able to at least start Windows and open a command-prompt. If you can’t then you’ll need to insert your operating system’s product disc into the optical drive and use the recovery-tools to get to a command-prompt.  However you do it, get to a command-prompt.

*Note: If, when you attempt to boot Windows, it says that it’s performing a disk-check, allow it to continue; as that’s what we’re trying to achieve anyway.

At the command-prompt, type “chkdsk /f /r” –> That’s chkdsk, space, forward-slash f,space, forward-slash r.

What that does is orders the operating system to run a disk check. If there is no specified drive, the os assumes that you mean drive C: . (If you do specify a drive, such as chkdsk E: /f /r then Windows will check the specified drive. (Drive E: in that example.)) The /f parameter orders chkdsk to check and repair the drive’s file system. – This includes entries in the MBR and the volume bitmap. The /r parameter orders chkdsk to check and repair files written to disk, and to search for and attempt to repair any bad sectors it finds.

Allow the process to run. – It may take hours, depending upon the size of your disk and the number of files written to it.

If chkdsk finds errors that it can’t repair then you need a tool called Spinrite from the Gibson Research Corporation. – But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

– When chkdsk has finished,  the machine should automatically boot into Windows. Windows should boot up OK unless there is a major error on another drive, in which case you’ll have to repeat the above process  on other drives, from the command line  until you’ve cleared the error preventing Windows from booting up.

Otherwise, once you’ve run chkdsk on the C: drive, you can run it on all other drives, sequentially, from within Windows. (Go to Computer or My Computer, right click a drive’s icon, click properties>tools, and run a disk check.) While chkdsk is running on any particular drive, you won’t be able to use that particular drive (Windows 7) as Windows will have to dismount it in order to run chkdsk on it. The drive in question will continue to appear in menus while this is happening, but access to it will be denied during the operation.

After chkdsk has been run on all drives the problems you were experiencing should largely go away. You may find, however, that your PC still isn’t performing with the same snappiness as it used to. This may be due to registry errors left behind after chkdsk corrected files.

There are many tools available that claim to do wonders by repairing the Windows Registry: Many of them do more harm than good though; so be careful when selecting such a program. Two such programs that I have found good, neither of which are free, are: -

Best of all are the registry tools in Win-Zip System Utilities.

Possibly next best – it does some good and no harm – is PC Pitstop Optimize.

Running these tools is, again, beyond the scope of this article. – At least you have your PC back in action anyway. If in any doubt consult a local qualified geek.