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:
- Start up Event Viewer by going to “Start” and going to search panel to type in “Event Viewer”.
- 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.
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.
Update #2
Another commenter, (Denny) left this great tip for pulling up your most recent Windows 7 chkdsk results. It involves Windows PowerShell which is available on most Windows Vista/7 computers. Here is his PowerShell command which I used and it’s vastly faster than digging through the Event Log.
get-winevent -FilterHashTable @{logname="Application"; id="1001"}| ?{$_.providername –match "wininit"} | fl timecreated, message
Simple copy and paste that into the Windows PowerShell command window and you’ll have your answer!
Update #3
Commenter, doncherry, helpfully wrote out how to pull up PowerShell which is available on Windows 7 and as a separate download on Windows XP:
To run it, click Start, click Programs, click Accessories, click the Windows PowerShell folder, and then click the Windows PowerShell item.
