A. When NT boots it performs a check on all volumes to see if the dirty bit is set, and if it is a full chkdsk /f is run. To stop NT performing this dirty bit check you can exclude certain drives. The reason you may want to do this is for some type of removable drive, e.g. Iomega drives:
- Run the Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe). You must use Regedt32.exe and not Regedit.exe
- Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager
- Change the BootExecute value from:
autocheck autochk *
to:
autocheck autochk /k:x *
Where x is the drive letter, e.g. if you wanted to stop the check on drive f: you would type autocheck autochk /k:f *. To stop the check on multiple volumes just enter the drive names one after another, e.g. to stop the check on e: and g: autocheck autochk /k:eg *, you do not retype the /k each time.
If you are using NT 4.0 with Service Pack 2 or above, you can also use the CHKNTFS.EXE command which is also used to exclude drives from the check and updates the registry for you. The usage to disable a drive is
chkntfs /x <drive letter>:
e.g. chkntfs /x f: would exclude the check of drive f:
To set the system back to checking all drives just type
chkntfs /d
