Man! What a conundrum! The other day I powered down my laptop (Windows 7 installed) in frustration and boom, upon rebooting, the poor thing decided that it needed to run chkdsk to fix parts of the hard drive.

Well, I guess the worst part is that a recent software package (in this case, likely a Windows update) seemed to be interfering with the install, so I got the following message:

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS
Volume label is OS.

One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly reccomended that you continue.
Windows will now check the disk.
Cannot open volume for direct access.
Autochk cannot run due to an error caused by a recently installed software package.
Use the system restore feature from the control panel to restore the system to a point prior to the recent software package installation.
An unspecified error occurred (766f6c756d652e63 3f1)

SO… I tried using system restore but sadly it wouldn’t run due to a corrupt disk, so I was trapped in a circular issue.

At this point, I figured my options were limited – recover data off the hdd and reformat and/or try to use an offline version of chkdsk. I chose the later, since it presented the best opportunity for getting back to work.

RESOLUTION: I insterted the Windows 7 installation DVD and booted from it. Went through the repair system motions, opened up a command prompt and ran:

chkdsk /f /r c:

Five hours later (yup – a super slow process), the chkdsk completed and Windows was stable again. After that, I removed some of the most recent packages on the computer with system restore (just to be safe) and voila, I was back at it.