scheduled chkdsk reboot loop hell

This isn't really about TI, but it did indirectly cause the current problem so I'm blaming it

TI reported that a file backup had failed because of a bad sector. I reran it a few times and it worked fine. To be on the safe side, I ran chkdsk and told it to fix errors and scan for bad sectors. Due to the disk being in use, it scheduled it for next boot.

3 hours later it finished and I heard the machine reboot. When I wandered in it was running chkdsk again. And that is where I am stuck. It runs it, reboots, runs it again, reboots.

It does give me the option of pressing any key to skip the scheduled scan. But that doesn't work. A search on Google appears to show that with Vista, the keyboard is disabled at that point in time and so despite the message you can't skip the test. I did try with a usb and a ps2 keyboard to see happens and neither worked.

Booting to safe mode doesn't work. It loads the drivers and then sits spinning the disk. I suspect chkdsk is running in the background. I haven't let it sit for 3 hours though. I may try that next.

I booted into the recovery console and ran chkntfs and it showed the dirty bit was not being set on the drive. So the schedule is not coming from there.

More Googgling said that chkdsk schedules are set in the registry and provided instructions for editing them out. But as I can't get into windows I can't get access to regedit.

I tried F8 at boot and telling it to use the last known good setup. But that also didn't work.

I do have a disk image I can put back on which I suspect will blow the problem away. But I would really like to figure out how to get out of this reboot loop without doing that.

Thanks.

 

If you can get into the recovery console and get to a command prompt, can you run chkdsk/r from there on each of your partitions? Perhaps after a successful completion from the recovery environment, the reboot loop will go away.

 

I tried that, but it didn't work. But the problem has solved itself. I gave up and left it doing its thing. When I came back some hours later it it was at the logon screen. I guess it got bored checking its drives over and over. Oh, and there were no bad sectors found