SOLVED: What Is CHKDSK /SPOTFIX?

What Does CHKDSK /SPOTFIX Do?

CHKDSK /SPOTFIX is a new feature of Check Disk that became available with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 and is exclusive to NTFS partitions. /SPOTFIX scans only the areas that have been detected as problematic by NTFS, instead of the whole drive. As a result most corruptions are fixed in seconds.

SpotFix Syntax

To use spotfix you need to specify the drive letter you want to work on so the syntax is

chkdsk X: /spotfix

Obviously you need to change the X: to whatever drive letter is appropriate for you. Please note that the command is not case sensitive and that you need to run it in an elevated CMD prompt. In the black screenshot below I ran it in Windows Terminal on my Windows 11.

However, spotfix still requires exclusive access to the disk so if the problem resides on your operating system drive or on a volume with shares, you are likely going to have to reboot.

Chkdsk /SpotFix Example

In the PowerShell example below, we were responding to an alert:

Eventsource: Windows System Event Log
Windows Event ID:  98
Message: Volume F: (\\Device\\HarddiskVolume7) needs to be taken offline for a short time to perform a Spot Fix.  Please run \CHKDSK /SPOTFIX\ locally via the command line  or run \REPAIR-VOLUME \ locally or remotely via PowerShell.

and we saw Restart to repair drive errors in the Windows Action Center

We were fortunate to find that corruption was detected on a volume (F:) that was largely empty and had no shares so we could run the CHKDSK /SPOTFIX without having to reboot or disable shares.

You can see that the CHKDSK /SPOTFIX solved all 19 problems in less than a quarter second. That is a nice improvement Microsoft.