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Is your bit dirty?
Often I hear the following complaint:
"Every time I start my computer chkdsk runs.
I let it finish and it never finds any problems."
What causes this unusual behavior? Something called "The Dirty Bit"
has been 'set' for the drive. The Dirty Bit is a 'flag' that
tells your Operating System that something might be wrong with your drive
or a partition, and to automatically run autochk.exe (a version of chkdsk)
before loading Windows. You would think that 'unsetting' it would be a
simple matter of searching the registry for the dirty bit and changing it,
right? Not so fast. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has never revealed
the location of the Dirty Bit in the registry. Why they have chosen to keep it
a secret is a mystery known only to the MS software gods.
But there is hope!
Microsoft did create a utility that can tell you whether the dirty
bit is set on a drive or partition. Its called "fsutil" and you can
use it to find out if the dirty bit is set for any drive/partition on
your system... You just have to know how to do it.
Using fsutil
Here is how to use fsutil to check for a dirty bit:
1. Click your Start button and select 'Run'
2. In the run box, type "cmd" and hit enter.(leave out quotes)
3. In the command prompt box type "fsutil dirty query x:"
(x is the drive/partition you want to check)
4. The command prompt box will return a message indicating whether
the drive is dirty or not
Clearing the Dirty Bit
Running autochk.exe at startup is supposed to clear the Dirty Bit,
but sometimes it just won't reset. Now, since the location of the Dirty
Bit is 'top secret' it would seem that we are stuck, but there are
some ways to 'unstick' the dirty bit.
Preferred Method
1. Open a command Prompt.
2. Type in "chkdsk x: /f /x" and hit enter.
3. After chkdsk finishes, run the fsutil query again and your drive
should be clean. Reboot and you should no longer have autochkexe running.
Alternate Method
Sometimes the above method fails to reset the dirty bit. Another thing
that usually works in this situation is to use a third party partitioning
program such as Partition Magic to resize the problem partition. Make it a
little bit smaller and then make another partition from the free space.
Then delete the partition and reclaim the space. This method is particularly
useful if the problem partition is your C: drive, since chkdsk will not run
on C from within Windows.
If resizing the partition fails to clear the dirty bit, the final 'last
resort' method you can do is to move all files off the drive, format the
drive and then move the files back.
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