It’s much easier to stop the scheduled disk check. 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. I tried the whole thing, but it still doesn’t work. When I ran a search from that location for the bit string, it came up with a result at address 31DE0. You are a sanity saver! The moral of the story is: NEVER IGNORE A RECURRING DIRTY BIT! You'll be sent an email notification when a new article is posted on the blog. You can still download the version of DMDE we used (2.4) to see the extra window that needs the Open button clicked. Have you read the section “Changing the Dirty Bit on Locked/System volumes” on page 2? оffset 1 is Dirty Volume, 0=clean, 1=dirty; The first challenge was the fact that the miscreant drive was an installed boot device. To clear the dirty bit in either case, set it to: Note there’s only one “01” in the string to indicate the dirty bit isn’t set. @tenbensel One such automated fixing tool is “gparted” — please see boisecoder’s Sept 27, 2016 comment above, especially the special Shutdown tip. My next step is to restore a backup using a state that predates the dirty bit problem, I’ll lose a bit of data but the chkdsk logs show some clean ones in August, I’ll post something with the results. SIGN UP NOW! Latest Windows 10 Update: Scheduled Chkdsk is No Longer Needed . Clear The Dirty Bit For A FAT (16) Volume As for a FAT (16) volume, the procedure is exactly the same as for FAT32 apart from the offset to change the value is slightly different. I used to disable WIA, but that disabled my scanner as well. Checked via DMDE and it showed it had *not* changed the bit to 00 – it was still at 01. Maybe, maybe not. ntfsfix … I had wondered why I could no longer leave a flash-drive in while booting the computer. Just about every site suggested using a hex editor to manually set the bit on the byte that contains the dirty bit location. :`(. I had never heard of “dirty” drives – well done on an excellent article. I moved all of them to another drive and proceeded with the formatting, breathing “thanks” to God for wisdom. When a volume's dirty bit is set, autochk automatically checks the volume for errors the next time the computer is restarted. It was often time-consuming and had to be stopped manually. If the computer won’t run coorectly after changing, and I remember the Offset (h) and change the numbers, can i go back and return to 03 01 01 01 ? Maybe you can add this info to your article, feel free to do so! Though this question belongs on Unix.SE, you can clear the NTFS dirty bit with the ntfsfixtool, which comes with the ntfs-3gpackage in most Linux distributions. 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 you run gparted, highlight the partition of interest — presumably an NTFS or FAT filesystem — then right-click and choose “Check”. Problem was that the strings the Hex Editor found were not exactly like the ones in the article. Is it possible that Win 8.1 has a completely different kind of string to look for? You can obtain Hiren’s Boot CD here… Then came a sick feeling with the memory of several years ago having this same experience with some other drive, and losing 176 GB, in my ignorance at the time thinking that the chkdsk operation was a virus that corrupted/destroyed all that data. I have a Silicon Power 1 TB external drive that fsutil.exe confirms is “dirty”. YEAH thanks, that finally fixed it as windows went into disk repair.’ Even if I have to fix the dirty bit the hard way, thanks for the article, and the great tip on DMDE, which is a great piece of freeware. I ran the chkntfs command in cmd to check all my hard disk drives and two of them proclaimed to be dirty which I believe is not true as I have ran the manufacturers diagnostic tools on them very recently.. anyway I followed the tutorial which works but I noticed I had to do it twice on each drive for it to actually change =S. There are guides on how to disable the scan and fix window by disabling the Shell Hardware Detection service but that really isn’t a viable solution since you’re telling Windows to ignore the problem rather than fixing the problem itself. :`( Applies to: Windows Server (Semi-Annual Channel), Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows 10, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8. I think my system was in some sort of gray area state where there was no fault, yet the dirty bit couldn’t be cleared. At the last step when i try to write the changes it says: “Could not lock unmarked volumes.” Furthermore forcing this will cause the loss of all used volume descriptors and ignoring may cause unpredictable result or write access may be denied. “03 01 01 01 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 18″ is the dirty bit if it’s been set in windows 8, in XP it will be “03 01 01 00 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 18″. 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. Just a pointer to where the bit is, back up your data if it’s important before you start editing. Got a full hex string to search for on this? ;). First you’ll want to open an elevated command prompt. . Would be great! I see the other volumes listed but I don’t see anything regarding exFat. changed it to But why is the fourth bit 0x40 instead of 0x00? e) fsutil dirty set c: Bottom line for me is that the approaches outlined in the article are good and will work for some but not all. If the drive Is actually dirty. Then I boot back into C and it came up with the disk check and I still could not defrag. I hope this could help some folks also having FAT16 media which shows this problem. This helped with a Windows 10 VDI deployment where disks (drive C:) of some machines were reportedly “dirty”… actually, the repair action was pretty quick (a minute or so), after reboot everything fine again (no chkdsk boot, no dirty disk anymore)! I tried a 2nd time and the situation repeats. Ignoring may cause file system damage or write access may be denied. Im lost, Normally this byte contains 00 Used it on my newly installed Windows 10 ver 1703 (OS bld 15063.138) by way of ‘DMDE GUI for Windows’ (dmde-3.2.0.692-win32-gui.zip). Thank you, Raymond, for explaining how to clear the dirty bit on my USB flash drive. I found that it has the following meaning regarding the “dirty bit”: Reformat and reinstall from a clean backup, if you have one. After a cold boot, I found everything in place on vol e:, and running ‘fsutil dirty query e:’ confirmed that dirt was history. Thanks for the invaluable comment!! Im in desperate need of some help. I have run chkdsk /r both normally and from the Restore Environment. After downloading DMDE 3.0.6 to my Windows 7 laptop, in the Partitions dialog box when I select this drive and click on “Open Volume”, there is a pop-up box saying: Click on it, press Ctrl+E to edit, change 01 to 00 and then press Ctrl+W to commit the changes. 20: 80 AA E6 00-70 0E 00 00-00 00 00 00-02 00 00 00 It will remove dirty bit and read only attribute on write-protected exFAT drive. Defragment solved the problem. Microsoft allows you to get an entirely fresh system by performing a clean install. 03 01 01 01 00 00 00 00 80 00 00 00 18 People like you is the reason i have faith in humanity. On the boot immediately after running chkdsk /r, fsutil shows that the Dirty Bit is clear.