Checking your drives for errors every once in a while can help fix some performance issues. Drive errors can usually be caused by bad sectors, improper shutdowns, bad software, corruption, physical damage, etc…
CHKDSK (Check Disk) checks the file system and file system metadata of a volume (drive) for logical and physical errors.
The chkdsk command is used to check the integrity of the file system on the hard drive and make necessary fixes. The command can also fix bad sectors on your hard drive.
Bad sectors are divided into “Soft bad sectors” and “Hard bad sectors”. “Soft bad sectors” are logical bad sectors, and chkdsk can easily fix them. “Hard bad sectors” are due to physical damage to the disk. CHKDSK cannot repair “Hard bad sectors”, but it can mark the sectors to stop any data writing to them and prevent issues.
This tutorial will show you how to run CHKDSK to check a drive for file system errors in Windows 11.