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Lesson 01
Courses / Windows Tips
How to Fix a Drive in Windows that Says The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable

Summary

Fixing Access Issues with NTFS Drives Using CHKDSK

If you're unable to access your NTFS drive and receive an error message, such as "the file or directory is corrupted or unreadable," you can resolve the issue using the CHKDSK command.

Steps to Fix the Drive

  1. Open Command Prompt:

    • Search for CMD in your menu to open the command prompt.
  2. Run CHKDSK Command:

    • Type the following command, replacing D with your drive letter:

      CHKDSK D: /F /R
      
    • Options Explained:

      • /F: This option fixes errors on the disk.
      • /R: This option locates bad sectors and recovers readable information.
  3. Execute the Command:

    • Press Enter to run the command. Depending on the size of your drive, this process may take some time (e.g., several hours for larger drives).
  4. Monitor Progress:

    • The command will proceed through stages, identifying and repairing issues on your drive.

Additional Information

  • For more details about the CHKDSK command, you can refer to the official Microsoft documentation at docs.microsoft.com.

This method can help you regain access to drives that are formatted as NTFS or FAT and are showing errors.

Thank you for watching!

Video Transcript

If you ever had a problem where you can no longer access your NTFS drive, I'll teach you one way you can fix that. If you got this message when you try to access, for example, an external hard drive in your machine and it's formatted NTFS and you got this error, for example, on Windows 10, location is not available, the letter of your drive, in this case H, colon, slash not accessible, the file or directory is corrupted or unreadable. One way you can fix this problem is if we use a command called check disk. So here's the documentation for that command, CHKDSK. You can find documentation in the Microsoft website, docs.microsoft.com, here's the URL if you want. You can just make a search for the CHKDSK docs. In any case, we're going to use this command to try to fix your drive so we can get access it again. And the option is I'm going to use our dash slash F and slash R. And so just so you know what that does, I'm going to scroll down in the documentation and explain each of those options. The option forward slash F fixes error on the disk. So you can use that, start with that and if you want to do more, we can also add the dash R which locates back sectors and recovers readable information. So we're going to combine dash slash F and slash R. So what you're going to do is you look for CMD or try to find CMD in your menu and that's the command prompt. So open the command prompt. Now you're going to type CHKDSK space, the letter of your drive followed by a colon. In my case, it's D colon space and then you're going to use slash forward slash F, okay? That should fix the problem. If you want to do more and it might take more time, you can also add the space slash R. So CHKDSK space letter, in my case D colon space forward slash F space forward slash R. And I already press enter to run the command. I already ran it so I'm running it right now so I'm going to show you what it's doing. So it went through the, it's going through the whole drive and it's fixing problems as it finds them. And because I use the dash F with the dash R, it's also doing additional stuff and it might take time depending how much capacity your hard drive has. In my case, I have an external drive that's pretty big. So it's going to take some time, maybe a few hours. You can see TA here, two hours, 30 minutes still. So because it's going through everything and trying to, in this case, stage five, looking for bad free clusters, there's so many things it does anyway. So that's it. CHKDSK, so you can find errors in your disk, like a hard drive, external hard drive, anything is format and NTFS or FAT for that matter, whatever. All right, so here's the documentation. If you want to read it before you try, but hope that helps you fix your problem, trying to access your drive that says it's corrupted or unreadable. Thank you so much for watching and goodbye.
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