During any day of using your Windows computer, you may run into a problem that can lead to file system problems and make a mess of the files. For example, if your computer’s power supply (SMPS) is not able to give the output required for the motherboard and other peripherals attached, then the hard disk will be the first one to suffer and it can lead to the data corruption. In these cases, Windows makes the hard drive partitions dirty so that a scan can be performed on the next boot.
At Windows boot, it checks which of the partitions are set to be dirty and then proceeds with the chkdsk utility to scan and fix any errors on these partitions. But before running the chkdsk on the dirty partitions, it shows a 10 seconds of countdown timer during which you can skip the scan. This can be very annoying because not many people want to skip the scan. Everyone wants to fix the file system errors obviously. Fortunately, there is a very simple way to reduce this countdown time:
- Launch the elevated command prompt. Windows 10 users can press Win+X and select Command Prompt (Administrator) for this. Windows 8 and 7 users will have to find cmd.exe in the Start Menu, right-click on it and choose Run as administrator for the elevated command prompt.
- In the command prompt, give the command: CHKNTFS /T:0 to set the countdown time to zero seconds. The default value of the countdown timer is 10 seconds. You can check the current countdown time value by giving the same command by without specifying the colon and 0 like CHKNTFS /T.
Instead of 0 seconds, you can specify any time you want in seconds. If you want to restore these settings to default values, then you can give the command CHKNTFS /D which in turn resets the countdown timer value back to 10 seconds.