$MFT is Corrupt and CHKDSK Runs on Startup Automatically

I am having a HP Pavilion system which has Athlon 64 processor. The ram is 512 MB and 80GB hard drive. I had installed Windows XP on the same. I had updated everything here. But now there is some problem with my system. Whenever I start my pc I am getting chkdsk on boot. The error that appear on my screen is - C:\$MFT is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the chkdsk utility. It is simply annoying. I am not able to get the cause behind the problem. I thought the issue was first with the antivirus so I changed it. But the issue is simply something different. What should I do.

The system is finding some problem with shutdown due to which you are getting the error. It is necessary that you have to turn off your system properly. When the system fail to turn of properly a error is generated which later on trigger chkdsk. Now try this. On boot run cmd in the admin account. Type chkdsk /r and hit enter. See what message you are getting on the screen. To turn off chkdsk on every boot you just need to type chkntfs /d in cmd. Then restart and check back.

There is one more command available by which you can generate a report of chkdsk on boot. For that you have to type chkdsk /f in cmd. It will give you a bit information on chkdsk event. Another thing you can do to find out the problem with the same is by going inside Event Viewer. Just go in the same and then checkout for the error description. See what you get in that. Post the error log here to get more help.

I think there is some problem with the hard drive. There are bad sectors in your system which is causing the issue. The best way to fix the problem is to find some good diagnostic utility that can give you a detail information on the bad sectors of your drive. If there are ample of bad sectors then it is the time to backup your data and then get the drive replaced. There are ample of hard drive diagnostic utility which can help you to fix the problem.

Even I think the issue lies with the hard drive. Due to bad sectors the chkdsk is triggered again and again. There is no harm if you let it run. It is important to find the information on report which is generated at the end. Just see if there are any errors in it or not. If there are error then they are associated with bad sectors. Those are the damage part of drive which will not work and you will need a replacement for the same.

I am using SeaGate tools. It is a nice set of utilities that gives clear information on the hard drive status. I had seen some bad sectors on it. But still the drive is working. I keep a regular backup because there is no guarantee when the system can turn of and cause major hardware problem. I had seen the number of bad sectors detected are intact. On every boot the system runs scan disk and I skip it. I am going to add a new hard drive soon and will use the second one for data.

Try to run a repair setup. That will be more helpful to fix the problem you are facing. You ca use a windows installation disc for the same. Just run a repair setup first and then see. The repair setup does not makes any major changes in the system. But it just replaces the system file. I will still recommend you to backup your data before doing it. Because somehow if the setup does not goes well you can face problem with the data backup.

Scandisk is a windows utility to find out problem with the hard disk. If chkdsk is running on boot then it simply means your system is having a problem and ignoring that is not a good idea. If the problem increases you might face a serious crash issue in future. It is recommended that you must run a clean setup back from scratch and then see. It happens the problem might be not with the hard drive but can be with some internal system files.

I was getting the same kind of issue on my laptop. I fixed that by running complete recovery. There was some issue on boot. Each time upon start there was problem with chkdsk. It takes a long time to complete. I tried to skip that a number of time but that was not the solution. So the last thing I did is performed a complete restoration and it worked. There was no problem at all with the same now.

I had the same issue and was about to use a partition table application. The solution for me was in running System Mechanic which cleared the issue entirely!