Jane Talks Tech!

a site for consumers, users and technology enthusiasts in 100 words or more ..

Windows tip of the day: viewing your chkdsk report

Jane, lead writer at Jane Talks Tech! is a self-taught photographer and blogger enthusiastic about computer software & whatever else catches her ire or fancy. Follow her on Twitter @janetalkstech or subscribe to Jane Talks Tech!

So, within days of using Windows 7 Ultimate, I suffered a bluescreen event (BSOD) and had Windows prompt a chkdsk run by itself. I was curious to see the results of the disk check, but if you have seen one of those occur, you'll know that the results scroll by too fast for you to read. I went to good old Google and within short order, I discovered that instructions on the internet are often incomplete (with mine being the exception, of course. :D)

The first site I found online told me to check the built-in Windows Event Viewer tool (right after the chkdsk was done) which is accessible on Vista or Windows 7 by "event viewer" in the search panel. I was told to search for an event prompted by Winlogon (as the source) and to go with the most recent entry. Clearly, I was doing my search a couple of days after the event and I didn't want to wade through score of entries in the event viewer.

The next hit online was more forthcoming and told me that I was looking for an entry from Winlogon as the source and the Event ID of 1001. Well, that was correct, but oddly enough, there was another entry called Wininit that contained the results I was searching for! So, to make this long story short, if you are looking for your chkdsk results, do the following:

  1. Start up Event Viewer by going to "Start" and going to search panel to type in "Event Viewer". Event Viewer
  2. Then, sort by clicking the "Event ID" tab or "Source" tab. What you are looking for it an entry that coincides with a winlogon or wininit entry AND the event ID of 1001.
    Wininit

And that's that! You're welcome. :)

Update:
On Windows Vista, a commenter (Alejandra) made the following edit: "... on Windows Vista, once you open the Event Viewer, you need to select Windows Logs on the menu on the right side, and then select Application."

Related Posts!

Share This Post!

4 Responses to Windows tip of the day: viewing your chkdsk report Article comments Feed

1

ARC

Thanks so much for this info. It was exactly what I was looking for!

Posted at December 15, 2009 on 7:59am

2

Alejandra

THANK YOU!! I've been surfing the web looking for how to read a CHKDSK log because when I ran it in command prompt it did it so fast and restarted the computer before I could look at anything.

I could not find where to look for it, as you said, a lot of the info on the web was unclear or incomplete.

This is a clear answer. But you might want to add that on Windows Vista, once you open the Event Viewer, you need to select Windows Logs on the menu on the right side, and then select Application.

Thanks again!

Posted at June 2, 2010 on 11:18pm

3

Jane Ullah of http://janetalkstech.com/

Alejandra,

Thank YOU. :) I'm just happy that my instructions were clear and directed you to the correct results. I'll update the post with your edits. Thanks again!

Sincerely,
Jane

Posted at June 3, 2010 on 2:42pm

4

Windows tip of the day: viewing your chkdsk report - Jane Talks Tech! of http://janetalkstech.com/windows-tip-of-the-day-viewing-your-chkdsk-report

...ininit.png">And that's that! You're welcome. :)Update:On Windows Vista, a commenter (Alejandra) made the following edit: "... on Windows Vista, once you open the Event Viewer, you need to select Windows Logs on the...

Posted at August 16, 2010 on 7:13pm

Write a response

Play nice (comments policy). Be constructive. Allowed HTML tags are: <a>, <strong>, <em> and <blockquote>

« I christen Mondays -… Using Habari from a … »