Yesterday I had to reboot my Windows 7 64-bit laptop after installing an update to a program. When the laptop started, I got a black screen saying that it had to check disk C: and that I could hit any key to skip the test. I decided to let it check for errors, but it only counted down to 1 second left to hit the key and froze or hung up.

This happened at every reboot. I feared my hard disk was failing or had failed. I stumbled upon a sequence that let me boot into Windows. Hitting F10 when Windows is starting on my laptop allowed me to access the BIOS setup screen and start a disk check. I let it do the quick check and then canceled the full check. After continuing, I was able to boot into Windows normally.

Still fearing a hard drive failure, I spent time backing up the drive as well as cloning the disk in preparation for buying a new drive.

Then I found a hot fix from Microsoft (from November 2009!) that addressed the issue. They fixed the issue over a year ago and didn’t distribute it with Windows Update! They are definitely pushing me to an alternative solution. Apple is much more expensive, or is it? I wasted almost 7 hours dealing with this issue. I hoping that Apple would not have had the issue at all or would have at least released a patch.

Anyway, after installing the patch, I started CMD as administrator and entered: chkdsk c: /f /r. This causes a disk check to be scheduled at the next reboot and runs all five levels of the check. The program found no errors. In the end it was just a bug in a Microsoft product that was patched over a year ago and the never released the fix!