I have an awesomely evil hard-drive corruption of some sort going on with my Windows 7 installation. Whenever I schedule a scandisk and restart, Windows tells me that the hard-drive is corrupted and I need to restore to a past system restore point.
The problem is, System Restore tells me that the C: drive has errors ("Windows has detected file system corruption on C:. You must check the disk for errors before it can be restored." Then asks me to launch scandisk, which then says it needs sole access to the C drive and requires a reboot…
Ad infinitum. My Windows installation seems OK, but I feel like I need to get this solved. How can I crack this paradox and either run scandisk, or restore to a previous system restore point?
Best Answer
Do you have another OS installed that you can duel-boot into?
If not, try booting using a PE disk such as Knoppix or BartPE. That way, you can scan the drive and fix any errors while not booted into Windows.
Another option is to boot into the recovery options (hold F8 before you see the Windows logo), then open a command prompt and run scandisk from there. You can then use System Restore from System Recovery before rebooting from recovery mode.