How to safely stop a `chkdsk /r /f C:` on Windows 10?

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I started a chkdsk /r /f C: on Windows 10, but now that it’s running I want to cancel it. Just powering down the computer risks corruption, so how can I safely abort it?

Ctrl+C isn’t an option: I’m running chkdsk /r /f on the drive that has Windows installed. This cannot be done while Windows is running, but only during startup (outside of CMD). This doesn’t respond to ctrl+c.

Note: the linked duplicate question is NOT the same. That question is about running chkdsk without parameters, and that is safe because it runs in read-only mode. The /r /f flags causes chkdsk to run in read-write mode, so then it’s not generally safe to just kill the process. It needs to be terminated gracefully. Some implementations of fsck (linux equivalent) can be stopped gracefully – even in repair mode – so theoretically it should definitely be possible to safely stop a chkdsk procedure. The main question is: did the Windows devs actually implement a graceful cancellation procedure, and if so how do I trigger it?

Answer

You can’t stop chkdsk process once it started. The safe way is to wait until it completes. Stopping the computer during the check might lead to filesystem corruption.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : Tiddo , Answer Author : Alex

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