File purpose checker

I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read. Search Ask Leo! The SFC improves system stability. Screenshot: askleo. The System File Checker is a little-known, simple-to-run command-line program.

It validates that Window's operating files are undamaged. Applies to Windows: 11 , 10 , 8 , 7 , Vista , XP. Do this Subscribe to Confident Computing! I'll see you there!

Podcast audio. Related Video. Scroll down to a hkey-local-machine b Software c Microsoft d Windows e Current Version f Setup You will see two lines that need to be changed.

Get out of the registry and reboot. My computer than ran the file checker. It took about a half hour. Once completed, I rebooted and got into Microsoft update. Thanks again, jubal Reply. Dear Leo You state that we should have installation discs handy.

Dane Hardinge Reply. This is what I got: Beginning system scan. This process will take some time. Beginning verification phase of system scan. Grant administrators full access to the corrupted system file. Replace the corrupted system file with a known good copy of the file. If the steps above don't work, you may need to reinstall Windows. For more info, see Windows 10 recovery options.

Windows 8. Need more help? Expand your skills. Get new features first. Was this information helpful? Yes No. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve? Connect with us. Sign up. Term of the Day. Best of Techopedia weekly. News and Special Offers occasional. Related Question How can you securely delete files? Synonyms Windows System File Checker. As we all know. Yet, if misused, it will cause unrecoverable damage to your drives. If chkdsk is interrupted by powering off, the file system can get corrupt i.

Just run it again. If it is in the process of attempting a repair, then you already had logical damage; and interrupting the process could make matters worse.

Chkdsk also lists and corrects errors on the disk. Used without parameters, chkdsk displays the status of the disk in the current drive. If you are encountering bad sectors — manifesting themselves as bad reads, writes or CRC errors — then CHKDSK may help and will remove that bad sectors from continued use.