How to safely abort chkdsk?

6,711

As far as I know, I've never had any trouble closing the CMD prompt. If you scheduled a boot-time scan, you're probably safe rebooting since you're just working with the free space right now, but then chkdsk will not have scanned the free space for bad blocks.

6,711

Nathan Osman

I am a software developer fluent in C++, Python, and JavaScript. I enjoy writing desktop tools, server software, and web applications. When writing programs with C++, I take advantage of the excellent Qt framework. On the Python side, I find that Django is hard to beat when it comes to ease of use and minimal configuration. I almost never write JavaScript without using jQuery. You can find a somewhat comprehensive list of software that I have written on my website: http://quickmediasolutions.com I've also written a few articles ([1], [2], [3]) for the SuperUser blog.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Nathan Osman almost 2 years

I am running chkdsk on a 1TB external hard drive. The scan is at stage 5 (scanning free space). It is taking forever... Is there a safe way to abort this? The drive has less than 20GB worth of stuff on it.
- Capi Etheriel over 14 years
  
  ctrl+c works for me.
- Nathan Osman over 14 years
  
  It works, but is it safe? And besides, I tried it and it DID NOT work.
- Rook over 14 years
  
  I've never had any trouble with it. Now, of course, one cannot prove it is safe ... since one cannot prove that someone somewhere didn't once had some trouble with it ... but for me, it is safe enough.
- rob over 14 years
  
  I don't recall ctrl+c ever successfully canceling chkdsk. I've always had to close the console (if running in a console) or reboot (if running a boot-time scan). Are you sure you're not thinking of Scandisk from back in the day?
- Capi Etheriel over 14 years
  
  sorry guys, i was thinking about fsck...
- Fake Name about 14 years
  
  ctrl+c closes chkdsk for me...