CHKDSK

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I started chkdsk on the C drive of a laptop. I did this through the GUI and re-started the computer. The first three stages completed with no issues. However, it has been stuck at 10% of stage 4 for hours with no movement. What does this mean? and what should I do now?

@Calla-Neil,

Please provide some additional details:

OS that you're running

Size of HDD and how much data is on the drive?

Any problems or symptoms before running chkdsk?

@Ronnie-Wong
I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium with service pack 1. Drive is 750 Gb drive with 86.5 Gb used, 586 Gb free. The system has been intermittently sluggish with no recent changes to anything. System would be sluggish opening files, programs etc both locally and on the internet and then it would become perfectly fine and responsive with no apparent rhyme or reason.

@Calla-Neil,

I would try to start the computer in safe mode. This will make sure that nothing in the startup besides Windows components are loaded. Then open the command prompt from here and see if you're still getting the same issue.

Typically, on larger conventional drives it does take a long time for the chkdsk to run especially if you've set it with the chkdsk /r option. If you do a search, you'll see some people have even left it overnight to see if it would complete.

If it remains stuck, it does indicate that the disk may be in state that will be difficult to repair. If possible, I would remove the disk and back up the data to known good HDD before proceeding with any type of repair.

If you don't want to try safemode you can boot to a repair disk and from command line run the chkdsk from the recovery environment from RAM and telling it check the disk itself.

@Ronnie-Wong
Thank you Ronnie! I will try the things you suggested. I think to be safe I will just go ahead and replace the HDD. Based on the issues I've been having, would you recommend cloning the drive or backing up the important files to an external HDD and then re-installing OS and applications?

@Calla-Neil,

Two different methods for two different reasons:

If you want to make sure that your recovery is an EXACT copy of what you currently have then clone it. With the cloning, the limitation you may have in the cloning software may require to you have the HDD partition with the exact same size (not always and not necessarily but may) If you haven't done this before (I haven't cloned a Windows 10 HDD) it may not boot without you also doing a recovery on the boot partition too. So if you're not experienced with this this may not be the way to go.

If you want to start over from a CLEAN install then I would recommend a backup. This method is possibly better because you know you start with a clean install of everything only to restore the data but it does take time to recover settings that you may have forgotten about too. So it possibly can take longer than you may expect.

@Ronnie-Wong Thanks so much for your help!