Windows 7: manually scandisk

How do I manually scandisk without the boot?

scandisk will not work on ntfs formatted drives.

you want to use chkdsk instead.

this tutorial may help...

Sorry, I meant chkdsk. How can I cksdsk manually then without the boot?

As far i know you can't run chkdsk on a system drive which contains the Windows installation without booting 1st as the files are in use by the Operating System (OS). It works fine for other drives/partitions which are not in use by the OS.

You can run chkdsk without any parameters (no /f or /r) to see if there are any problems, but if there are, you need to run it again with the /f or /r (/r preferred) parameter to actually correct any errors it finds. When you do you will get this message:

The type of the file system is NTFS.
Cannot lock current drive.

Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another
process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be
checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)

Reply Y then reboot.

You have a read of this tutorial:

Check Disk - chkdsk - Vista Forums

chkdisk runs with a reboot so as to not have conflicts with the Windows system. Even if you can run it without the flags it really doesn't gain you anything to do so as you would have to run it again to fix anything found. Further..if you don't scan for bad sectors (use only when needed) it doesn't take that long to run it.....I recommend fixing pointers always before a defrag but that is just a personal choice.