At times we all might face situations when our Pc behaves abnormally. We get lots of error messages. But the good thing about Windows is that it gives us options to rectify these issues within built utilities. Such a utility from Windows is the Scan file system command line utility. With this simple command line utility you can check for system file errors and rectify them.

Note: You need to open command prompt in administrative mode.

From command prompt type the following command.

sfc

SFC [/SCANNOW] [/VERIFYONLY] [/SCANFILE=<file>] [/VERIFYFILE=<file>]

[/OFFWINDIR=<offline windows directory> /OFFBOOTDIR=<offline boot directory>]

/SCANNOW Scans integrity of all protected system files and repairs files with problems when possible.

/VERIFYONLY Scans integrity of all protected system files. No repair operation is performed.

/SCANFILE Scans integrity of the referenced file, repairs file if problems are identified. Specify full path <file>

/VERIFYFILE Verifies the integrity of the file with full path <file>.  No repair operation is performed.

/OFFBOOTDIR For offline repair specify the location of the offline boot directory

/OFFWINDIR For offline repair specify the location of the offline windows directory

Example:

sfc /SCANNOW

sfc /VERIFYFILE=c:\windows\system32\kernel32.dll

sfc /SCANFILE=d:\windows\system32\kernel32.dll /OFFBOOTDIR=d:\ /OFFWINDIR=d:\windows

sfc /VERIFYONLY

Note: If the utility finds errors on your system it may ask for the operating system media.

Hope this helped, do comment. 🙂