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chkdsk slowing down on new VM

Anonymous
2025-02-16T22:58:24+00:00

chkdsk C: slows down significantly as it runs in read-only mode. After a few hours it showed almost 24 hours remaining, after 2 days this has grown to over 208 hours remaining (According to the original estimate it should be finished)

Details:

  • This is a new virtual machine at a major hosting provider.
  • As part of preparing the machine, I ran Windows Update, followed by DISM cleanup, then a chkdsk to make sure everything is sane baseline.
  • But this first chkdsk run is insanely slow . I experienced the same on an older VM running an older Win10-based build, so it seems something in chkdsk is weird.
  • This VM has a 30GB HDD advertised as based on traditional rotating disks in a SAN at the hosting provider . The disk only contains Windows itself and a few other files .
  • The Windows version reported when opening a command prompt is 10.0.20348.3207 (21H2 server edition).

Current lines from command prompt:

C:\Users\jbadmin\Downloads>chkdsk C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.

WARNING!  /F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
Progress: 329886 of 492544 done; Stage: 66%; Total: 23%; ETA: 208:57:43 ..

Is there a way to make it run in reasonable time?

Windows Server Remote and virtual desktops

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  1. Anonymous
    2025-02-18T08:08:20+00:00

    Hi,

    Please run chkdsk with the /f and /r parameters to see if the issue persists. You can do this by running the command chkdsk C: /f /r

    Also attach the virtual disk to another VM or the physical host and run chkdsk again.

    Check the underlying storage performance of the VM and ensure that the underlying disk where the VM is hosted is healthy. You can contact your hosting provider to run diagnostics on the disk to rule out any hardware issues.

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  2. Anonymous
    2025-02-24T16:02:53+00:00

    As I explained initially, there is no reason to believe the disk itself is bad in any way. That makes your idea to run chkdsk /R meaningless waste of time when the issue is already the slowness of chkdsk!

    Running chkdsk /F on the Windows drive always requires a reboot and is thus very difficult given the problem that even a chkdsk without /F takes days, and servers need to be up and running, not stuck in a boot-time chkdsk run.

    Now stop annoying professional users with useless answers designed to slow down consumers!

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  3. Anonymous
    2025-02-24T16:10:22+00:00

    Update:

    Running chkdsk with the /I and /C options helped slightly, making the operation complete in under 2 days, but also provided "scary" disclaimers about the extra checks being turned off . Even in this mode, the "time remaining" indicator was erratic . It seems that someone has failed to maintain and update the chkdsk code between the 2014 Server 2012R2 build and the 2021H2 Server 2022 build.

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