"CHKDSK cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process."
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. Ask
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askleo.com/patron for more information. So, CHKDSK
Cannot Run because the volume is in use by another
process is a very confusing message that people often get
when they try to run CHKDSK. Let me show you real
quick exactly what it looks like and what happens. So, here
we are in the Windows ten home machine. I'm going to run
an administrative command prompter power shell in this
case. It doesn't really matter. And what we're going to do is
run CHKDSK slash F. If you run it without the slash F or the
slash R, it's not going to try and make any changes to the
disc. So, it's not going to need what it needs to make
changes. Now, I'm saying CHKDSK slash F. CHKDSK cannot
run because the volume is in use by another process. So,
the other process that is using this disk. Remember, this is
drive C. The other process that's using the disk is
Windows itself. So, you've got kind of a chicken and egg
problem, right? You can't run CHKDSK because Windows is
running but you have to run Windows in order to get to this
part where CHKDSK can run. That's why it's asking if you'd
like to schedule this to be run the next time you reboot. If
you say no, it's as if nothing happened. In fact, I'm going to
say no right now because I also wanna show you what it looks
like when CHKDSK runs on a volume that isn't in use. So,
we have another drive on this system. If we take a look, um
you can see that I've got this drive um H here which is some
kind of an old installation disc or something that I had.
Um it's a USB drive that I've plugged into this machine. So,
if instead I say CHKDSK slash FH, everything runs
properly. That's because nothing else was trying to use
that drive at the same time as I was. If I try and run CHKDSK
slash F which by default now is going to run on the C
drive. It'll say it can't, would we like to do it on the
next restart? I'm going to say yes. By saying yes, it
basically has put instructions into the startup sequence for
Windows that says, next time you start up, run CHKDSK.
Let's see what that looks like. I'm gonna go ahead and shut
down or sign out. Nope, I'm gonna restart.
So now Windows is restarting and it should in just a moment
tell us that it's a running CHKDSK. To skip disc
checking, all that really means is we changed our mind. We
don't want to run CHKDSK. We have an opportunity to
prevent CHKDSK from running right now. I'm going to let it
run. The point is of course that CHKDSK can take a
while. CHKDSK can take depending on your machine.
Quite a bit of time depending on the speed of the disc. How
big the disc is and more. In this case, since I've got a
fairly small disc and this is a virtual machine on a much
faster machine. It actually shouldn't take that long but
you can see now that CHKDSK is running and Windows hasn't
started up yet.
Once it's done scanning the drive, it reboots yet again but
this time, it reboots directly into Windows.
And there we are. We have successfully run CHKDSK. To
see the results of what CHKDSK just did, it is possible. Got a
different article on that. It's called how do I see the results
of a CHKDSK that ran on boot? It's AskLeo.com/4534.
That will walk you step by step through finding
theCHKDSK output of a CHKDSK that ran while you
are booting. For more information, for updated links,
for related links like that one, for comments and more,
visit askleo.com/4507. I'm Leo Noteenboom. This
is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.