willy - how big are your disc drives. Stage 4 can take a long time with large disc drives.

Can you start the system in Safe Mode; if you can, do so. Otherwise see if you can start from disc.

Open a command window (Start/Run/cmd) and type the following command:

  >fsutil dirty query C:   (or whichever drive failed the check).

If this reports drive C DIRTY then chkdsk will always try to run at startup.

You can prevent chkdsk from running with the command:

  >chkntfs /x C:   (or C: D: .. if you have more)

This prevents the disk being checked on startup, even if chkdsk should run on it.

Then you can try running a quick chkdsk from the command line to try and clear the flag:

  >chkdsk /i C:

This only checks the file indexes (and not thoroughly) and doesn't do the stage 4 and 5 checks. Hopefully this will clear the dirty setting and stop chkdsk running on restart.

We still have to sort out your missing disc space! Did your drives show the full capacity or not?

(If you want to take this off the thread or want more info on these commands PM me; I should be online for a while).

Mick