my pc has went into checkdisk mode fixing stage 1 at startup.
its going to take forever
eta 297 hours
1874176 things to check only done 4818 of them after 20 mins
any way i can stop this?
otherwise im just gonna have to hold power button in,as dont want to leave running all night
only going to take another 333 hours now.

 

Last edited: Jan 25, 2026 at 12:14 AM

That ETA is bogus. Checkdisk always lies early on. If you hard power off, you could make any corruption worse.

Try control+c or some other keyboard shortcut to quit it.

 

your best chance at a working computer is to let it run. sucks that your drive is corrupted but it is what it is. you may have to rebuild anyway, but keeping as much of your data as you can is worth it.

though, if you have a recent backup you may as well start restoring it now

 

watchout. that happened to me. the more you keep going with the chkdsk the more you'll be damaging the harddrive - if it's an hdd and somthing happened to it, like falling. i had to send my drive to a special recovering facility and ended up paying somthing like 1500€ to recover my data. and still about 35% of it was corrupted and forever lost. one of the disks of the hdd went to the can and all that was in it gone. spent 3 months waiting for the outcome. so if you value what you got in it i'd take it to the professionals.

 

Install CrystalDiskInfo and post the screenshot here! This tool reliably shows you actual hard drive errors!

How to Use CHKDSK to Repair & Fix Windows Hard Drives
A buggy PC can derail your entire week. Thankfully, the built-in Windows CHKDSK (check disk) utility can find and repair bug-causing errors easily. Keep reading to learn how to use CHKDSK to improve the performance of your computer. Then, get a powerful optimization tool to keep your computer running smoothly.
https://www.avast.com/c-chkdsk-windows

Spoiler: Here’s how to run CHKDSK from Command Prompt on Windows:

Here’s how to run CHKDSK from Command Prompt on Windows:

1. Type cmd (Command Prompt) in the Start menu search bar, then click Run as administrator.
   
   
2. Type chkdsk and hit Enter. CHKDSK will scan for drive errors and let you know if it found any you should repair, but it won’t try to fix them without a command.
   
   

This command should work for all Windows versions, whether you’re running CHKDSK on Windows 11 or Windows 7.

CrystalDiskInfo
- A HDD/SSD utility software which supports a part of USB, Intel RAID and NVMe.
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/

How to Fix Windows with a Repair Install
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/how-to-fix-windows-10-with-a-repair-install

Run System File Checker
In the Command Prompt window, type the following command, and press ENTER:
sfc /scannow
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...em-files-79aa86cb-ca52-166a-92a3-966e85d4094e

 

i went to bed and left it running,woke up few hours later went in to look at pc and it had finished.
going like a charm now.
before it was taking at least 10 mins to shut down.os is on an ssd the disk that was being checked was an hdd

 

I think its time to replace the HDD

 

Its not that its lying per say, its telling you the estimate if every sector it had to check was the same as the sector it was checking at the time. it starts with the most full sectors and works down. But yes very inaccurate, and powering off during chkdsk is indeed a terrible idea. might as well turn it off during a bios update and sink the fckr lol

 

Do yourself a favor and install this: CrystalDiskInfo - An HDD/SSD utility software that supports some USB, Intel RAID, and NVMe. https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskinfo/ Windows usually repairs or replaces bad sectors. With this tool, you can monitor the errors and the health of your hard drive. If you'd like, post a screenshot here.