Each week I conduct regular system maintenance, part of which is Disk Defragmenter and Disk Checker. However, I have recently had trouble running Disk Checker when ticking both options: ‘Automatically fix file system errors’ and ‘Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors’. When the computer restarts to carry out these tests a message appears during bootup saying: ‘Cannot open the volume for direct access. Finished checking the disk’. Thinking to run the test in Safe Mode, I reboot again and then press F8 and select ‘Safe Mode’ from the startup menu. During the Safe Mode startup a list of drivers appear on screen, but the boot freezes about half way through. This leaves no option except switching the computer off and restarting. How can I get the Disk Checker to work? The computer is Windows XP Professional SP2.

When the Disk Checker utility (Chkdsk) needs to scan and fix problems, the program needs exclusive access to the hard drive, meaning no other programs can concurrently access the hard drive. This is why Chkdsk (when configured to fix detected problems) must run at startup before any other programs or processes have loaded. The message appearing indicates some process is accessing the hard drive, so Chkdsk is unable to complete the operation. There was no fix for this issue prior to the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2. However, according to a Microsoft Knowledge Base article (support.microsoft.com/kb/823439) the issue has been resolved in Service Pack 2. That said, you have already installed Service Pack 2 on the computer, so it seems this has not helped to resolve the problem. The next best suggestion is to visit Windows Update (windowsupdate.microsoft.com) to download and install any updates for Windows, in case there is an update which fixes this issue.

Users have also reported the issue being related to programs and processes on the computer which load very early and access the hard drive, such as some virus scanners and firewall software. Unfortunately it would be very tricky to determine whether this is the root cause of the issue, and even more difficult to determine the exact process which is the cause. This is because the processes which load this early are generally not easily disabled, given their integration into the Windows systems. I imagine you attempted to start the computer into Safe Mode to avoid this potential issue of processes loading early and preventing Chkdsk from running. I also tried starting the computer into Safe Mode (after requesting Chkdsk runs on startup) and experienced the same problem - during the device drivers loading, the system froze. So, it appears this is an issue not unique to your system. Unfortunately, I am unsure how else to proceed in order to make Chkdsk run correctly. Since you obviously perform very good and disciplined computer maintenance, my advice would be not to worry running Chkdsk since you are not experiencing any problems at the moment and may not really need to run Chkdsk.