Whenever I boot chkdsk runs on drive e: but never reports any errors. chkntsf E: reports that E: is dirty. chkntsf /x E: has no effect. When I use E:>Properties>Tools>Check Now with the scan for bad sectors it doesn't report any errors. In the registry HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE> SYSTEM> CurrentControlSet> Control> Session Manager> BootExecute is set to autocheck autochk *. chkdsk is not in my task scheduler to run. The boot delay is annoying, of course and I'd like to get rid or the chkdsk run. More than that, I'd like to find out why the e drive is marked as dirty. Any help you could give will be much appreciated. Ron

If you don't get an easy fix, you might have to back up everything on the drive, repartition and format. I had to do that once.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831... Chkdsk.exe or Autochk.exe starts when you try to shut down or restart your computer

Thanks for the responses and the link. I was just about to try the Recovery Console approach when I realized I had never run chkdsk manually from a command prompt. I had used Start>Run to run chkdsk but that just scheduled it for the next boot, which did nothing. So I ran chkdsk from a command window--it ran, found no errors and--hooray!--turned off the dirty bit. Problem solved. Thanks for your responses and help.