Check Disk, better known as chkdsk, is an important Windows utility to check the health of your disks. When your hard drives start acting up and you start getting disk errors, the Check Disk utility can be a blessing.

But with dozens of chkdsk command parameters out there, it can be confusing to know when to use the chkdsk command and which parameters to call. To help you in your task of maintaining the health of your drives, here’s everything you need to know to run the chkdsk repair command.

The Check Disk utility is an integral part of Windows and is used to scan the (non-physical) hard drives of your PC and ensure that they do not contain any corrupted files.

Check Disk analyzes the integrity of the file system and file metadata on a disk, looking for logical and physical errors. Logical errors are corrupted entries in the disk's master file table (an important structure that tells the disk how files are arranged) and are automatically repaired by the Check Disk utility.