Running chkdsk from Windows File Explorer

You can run the Microsoft Windows chkdsk program from within the Windows File Explorer by right-clicking on the drive you wish to check and selecting Properties or with the drive selected, click on Properties from the tool bar at the top of the File Explorer window.

Note: the steps below were taken on a Windows Server 2012 system and the screen shots below are from that system.

Drive Properties

Then click on the Tools tab.

Drive Properties - Tools

Then click on the Check button. If the operating system isn't aware of any errors on the drive you will see "We haven't found any errors on this drive. You can still scan the drive for errors if you want." You can click on "Scan drive" to commence the scan.

Error checking for drive

When the chkdsk scan is completed, you should see a "Your drive was successfully scanned" window where you can click on "Show Details" to see the details of the scan results.

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Drive successfully scanned

If you click on Show results, you will be taken to the log entry in the Event Viewer Application log. The event id number for running chkdsk is 26226.



Event Viewer application log - chkdsk

To list the times such chkdsk tests were run from a command line interface (CLI), you can find all the entries in the Application log from a PowerShell prompt using the get-eventlog cmdlet as shown below:

PS C:\> get-eventlog -LogName "Application" | where-object {$_.EventID -eq 26226}

   Index Time          EntryType   Source                 InstanceID Message
   ----- ----          ---------   ------                 ---------- -------
  383344 May 14 11:24  Information Chkdsk                      26226 Chkdsk was executed in scan mode on a volume sn...


PS C:\>