My computer is around a year old and is running Windows 7 Home Premium and has all updates installed and all of the drivers are the most recent versions. The hard drive is a 1 TB WDC Caviar Black, which is pretty full. Recently, the computer started rebooting and running CHKDSK (3 stages). CHKDSK does not find any errors, but it hangs after USN Journal Verification. Eventually, it times out and does the same thing all over again until someone interrupts the process. I tried running the full 5 stages of CHKDSK to see if it would reveal any problems. It took HOURS and HOURS, but eventually hanged after 5 stages with no reported errors. Just to make sure of the expected behavior of CHKDSK, I ran it on another computer with a similar configuration. After USN Journal Verification, it does a few more things and then exits, so there is definitely something wrong. I downloaded the WDC diagnostic which ran for several hours yesterday. It did not reveal any hardware problems. I have reported this to WDC, but I don't have high expectations that they will send me a new drive so I'm hoping that someone knows how I can work around this problem.

I heard back from WDC and they are saying there is nothing wrong with the drive. I am out of ideas. Is there a work around for this problem such as a third-party tool if there is no way to get CHKDSK to repair the file system without hanging?

Is there a different mode that I can use to run CHKDSK so it reports errors? I am stuck on this problem unless I can find a tool to diagnose and repair what is causing CHKDSK to hang.

I have exactly the same problem, but the Windows 7 work perfectly.

As a result of the incurable chkdsk hang and for other reasons, I decided to do a reinstall of Windows 7. I used HDClone to move the files to another drive and ran chkdsk. It reported problems in the freespace, which it fixed. Interestingly, the part fo chkdsk where the freespace is checked is the area where it was hanging, so something was obviously messed up. After I moved the data off, I wiped the disk, formatted it and ran diagnostics and chkdsk. It seems clean so I will keep using it.