I have been through this drill with a dirty bit on a drive installed in Windows 10 Pro machine.
On we’ll show how to clear the dirty bit for NTFS, FAT32, FAT16 and locked volumes. HxD is certainly one of the easiest tools to use and can make the needed changes but is a bit slower because it needs to manually search the drive for some values. Only DMDE, WinHex and Hex Workshop were the editors able to write the data back to the disc but the last two are shareware tools. We’ve tried a total of 13 different hex editors which are wxHe圎ditor, HxD, 010 Editor, CI Hex Viewer, iBored, He圎dit Pro, Hackman Suite, DMDE, Hexprobe, FlexHEX, ADRC Hard Disk Hex Editor, WinHex and Hex Workshop. As we said earlier, the dirty bit is simply 1 hex value on the disc volume that needs to be reset and is easy to change again in future once you know how. Here is a third method, and we’ve spent several hours locating the dirty bit on NTFS and FAT16/32 file systems so that we can manually reset or clear the dirty bit with a hex editor that supports disk editing. The second option is safer but takes a lot of time if you have a lot of files to move. Going with the first option would risk losing some of your files when the scan disk decides to turn them into CHK files.
So there seems to be 2 solutions to clear the dirty bit which is to trust the Microsoft disk checking utility by completing a check disk OR you can move the data away from the volume, format the drive and then move it back. This can happen if you remove the device or disc before all files have been written to it. There might be a problem with some files on this device or disc.
This method doesn’t clear the dirty bit on the drive though and simply forces Windows not to scan a drive on boot.Īs for a USB flash drive or portable hard drive with the dirty bit enabled, plugging the drive into a Windows 7 computer will prompt a window that asks:ĭo you want to scan and fix Removable Disk (G:)? This will usually keep happening until you let the drive be scanned or alternatively you can tell Windows to stop checking the specific drive.
You can skip the disk checking by pressing any key but it will come back again the next time you start up your computer. When the computer boots up with the dirty bit enabled on a hard drive, you will be asked to check the disk for consistency before Windows is loaded. Windows will check the dirty bit to determine if a volume can contain corrupted files due to hard resetting your Windows computer with files that are still opened or when you unplug a USB flash drive that is in the midst of copying a file. Basically a dirty bit is just a 1 hex value located somewhere hidden on the hard drive that Microsoft has never reveal until recently. What would happen if I moved or deleted that chunk of files (is it safe to do that)? I was hoping someone more knowledgeable could shed some light on what's going on, before I find out the hard way.One mystery that has gone unsolved for the longest time now is the dirty bit on hard drive volumes. chk file? I don't know anything about NTFS, but this situation seems pretty ridiculous to me. Can't this information be stored in the file system itself like it should, instead of that. What that means, as far as I can tell, is that "file0000.chk" contains file system information pertaining to the chunk of files that I mentioned, without which I cannot access those files (they'd be lost clusters in FAT32, and that's probably correct for NTFS too although I don't really know anything about that). I ran a check again, "file0000.chk" came up again, and my files were visible and accessible again.
But after that, I noticed that a pretty big chunk of files (think GB) disappeared, even though the system reported the same free space as before. I deleted it without thinking too much of it (like I would after running scandisk on a FAT32 volume). Then, I found a "found.000" directory in the root of that partition, containing a 708 byte "file0000.chk" file. I checked it for errors (from M圜omputer, I right clicked on the volume, and chose properties->tools->error checking->"check now" button, just to be clear). I have WinXP Pro (SP2), and I recently had some problems with one of my NTFS partitions.