[dplasmus]

When I booted up my Dell laptop today, CHKDSK automatically ran in a blue screen with the windows logo on the top right of my screen. it said "Checking File system on C: / type of file system NTFS / the volume is dirty" it had three stages and mentioned something about a usn journal near the end.
is this bad? is there any way to prevent this? should I be concerned? why does this happen?

any clarification would be appreciated.
thanks

[Rich-M]

By the time that happens, the hard drive usually could stand to be replaced. What model dell, how old etc????

[IMiteBable2help]

Try searching the forum before posting and you'll find where this issue has already been solved: http://forums.techguy.org/windows-nt...-question.html

This might also help:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...3182232AA5bz0S

[dplasmus]

its an old inspiron 6000 notebook and I'm going to replace it in a year or so anyway. Is there any way to clean the disk or something, you know to reduce the occurence of this problem? (this isn't the first time this happened)

[IMiteBable2help]

Did you try the links?

[Rich-M]

Originally Posted by dplasmus

its an old inspiron 6000 notebook and I'm going to replace it in a year or so anyway. Is there any way to clean the disk or something, you know to reduce the occurence of this problem? (this isn't the first time this happened)

You are risking everything you own on it but try running chkdsk /r as I wrote it from a .cmd prompt

[dplasmus]

ok so I should follow the instructions in the link
are there any risks?

[dplasmus]

you do mean the ones from JackHackett right?

[dplasmus]

ok so my volume is "NOT dirt" according to fsutil dirty query c:
sooo... i don't think i need to run a CHKDSK
all i want to do, is to avoid any more dirtiness in the future
does anyone know how? please

[IMiteBable2help]

It takes quite a bit of time depending on the size and speed of you hard drive, but it would be a good idea to use chkdsk to scan for bad sectors,(Areas of the disk that cannot be written to, or read reliably) not just file system errors. Sometimes hard drives develop small spots that are bad. This is no big deal because they can be mapped to a different area of the HDD. Scanning for bad sectors can mark these areas so your OS will not attempt to write to these areas again. That should prevent the disk from coming up "dirty" again. Maybe. Not guaranteed, but it sure can't hurt. File system errors happen when you shut off your system by force, before a file has a chance to get fully written to the disk, whereas bad sectors are bad spots on the disk that can't be read or written to reliably. The latter is more likely to cause your "dirty" issue.

[dplasmus]

ok so I should run chkdsk anyway using the process Jack Hackett suggested on the other post?

[dplasmus]

ok I finished the scan yesterday, is there anything else I can do?