Windows XP: How to cancel a chkdsk or scandisk scheduled upon reboot

If you have a chkdsk or scandisk scheduled to run on a drive after your next reboot, normally you’d be able to cancel it by pressing any key 10 seconds before the scan starts. Unfortunately, my bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo didn’t seem to work at this stage of bootup, so I was unable to cancel any scan. After some research I found out that the scheduled scan is simply a registry entry and that if you remove it, the scan wouldn’t execute next time you reboot. Here’s how:

  1. Start > Run > regedt32
  2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\\SYSTEM\\CurrentControlSet\\Control\\Session Manager
  3. Open the BootExecute key
  4. Remove the line that says: autocheck autochk /r \??\E: where “E:” is your drive letter
  5. Exit Regedit and reboot, and no scan will execute

One response to “Windows XP: How to cancel a chkdsk or scandisk scheduled upon reboot”

  1. Jacky Tai says:
    March 28, 2010 at 1:14 am

    This is excellent advice. Thanks. I have a SSD hard drive. When I scheduled a scan disk it said it’s a non-NTFS drive and can’t scan. But everytime I start the computer it will try to scan and then tell me the same old stupid thing. Thanks, man. Got the scan cancelled now.