‘Autochk.exe’ is a built-in system utility in Windows Vista that scans the whole system for errors. Usually, this utility starts when your system recovers from an error or after an improper shutdown. Though, ‘Autochk.exe’ is a reliable tool, sometimes it leads to disk corruption. In a few cases, the aftermath of disk corruption could be tremendous and cause a perilous situation of data loss. To overcome this problem, you need to go for hard drive recovery through a reliable third-party utility.
The most frequent outcome is a black screen that halts all your operations and affects your work-related assignments and other tasks adversely. If the issue doesn’t get fixed, then you may use a data backup to restore all your important files and documents. In the worst cases, only a hard drive recovery software can retrieve all your lost data.
Cause
The ‘Autochk.exe’ tool in the Windows Vista identifies any logical error on the hard disk and rectifies it. However, this tool uses a different criteria to determine corruption than the one used by the NTFS system. Therefore, when NTFS identifies a volume as corrupt, the Autochk.exe fails to do so. In fact, it reports the volume as clean. As a result, a black screen appears on your desktop.
Resolution
You may perform the following steps to fix the issue –
- Download the Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows Vista SP1 and for Windows Server 2008
- Create a Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) 2.1 disc.
- Restart the computer by using the Windows PE 2.1 disc and then, run the ‘chkdsk /f‘ command to fix hard disk corruption.
If the above mentioned resolution steps are not able to fix the issue for you, then you need to format the hard disk and reinstall Windows Vista. If you do not have an updated backup, this would result in a critical situation of data loss. In such instances, you can use Windows hdd recovery software to recover all the lost, deleted, or formatted data.
There are abundant third-party free download data recovery software available in the market. They can safely and efficiently recover all your esteemed photos, songs, files, documents, videos, etc.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is an excellent utility that recovers data from FAT, NTFS and exFAT based partitions. The software supports recovery from external and internal hard disks, USB drives, memory cards, etc. Moreover, it is compatible with Windows7, XP, Vista, 2003 and 2000.