How can I stop chkdsk at boot time from checking volume x?

John Savill

January 8, 2000

1 Min Read
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A. When NT boots it performs a check on all volumes to see if the dirty bit is set, and if it is a full chkdsk /f is run. To stop NT performing this dirty bit check you can exclude certain drives. The reason you may want to do this is for some type of removable drive, e.g. Iomega drives:

  1. Run the Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe). You must use Regedt32.exe and not Regedit.exe

  2. Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession Manager

  3. Change the BootExecute value from:
    autocheck autochk *
    to:
    autocheck autochk /k:x *

Where x is the drive letter, e.g. if you wanted to stop the check on drive f: you would type autocheck autochk /k:f *. To stop the check on multiple volumes just enter the drive names one after another, e.g. to stop the check on e: and g: autocheck autochk /k:eg *, you do not retype the /k each time.

If you are using NT 4.0 with Service Pack 2 or above, you can also use the CHKNTFS.EXE command which is also used to exclude drives from the check and updates the registry for you. The usage to disable a drive is

chkntfs /x :
e.g. chkntfs /x f: would exclude the check of drive f:

To set the system back to checking all drives just type

chkntfs /d

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