Main Hard Drive Has Unknown Errors.

Question

Today, I was trying to put my PC to sleep when it stayed on.  My monitors turned off (as they normally do) but the PC kept on running.  I turned it off by forcing it to shut down.  Later on today, I rebooted it and it took about 2 minutes longer than normal to reboot.  Once Windows opened up, I got a message in my notifications that my hard drive needed to be scanned for errors.  A prompt pulled up asking me for if I wanted the program "Microsoft/fsavailux" to run.  I allowed it to but nothing seemed to happen on my computer.  I then went to my hard drive's properties page in order to run a Disk Check on it.  I tried to scan the drive, but I get an error saying "There was a problem scanning this drive."  Under the details of the error, I get this:

Chkdsk was executed in scan mode on a volume snapshot.  

Checking file system on C:

The shadow copy provider timed out while flushing data to the volume being shadow copied. This is probably due to excessive activity on the volume. Try again later when the volume is not being used so heavily.

A snapshot error occured while scanning this drive. You can try again, but if this problem persists, run an offline scan and fix.

My PC appears to be running fine as of now, but I'm not sure if I need to do anything to my hard drive.

Also, my PC is an HP brand.

Answer 1

Something to have in mind: Even when you're not actively using it, your PC is performing all kinds of housekeeping functions in the background like indexing, syncing, running the TRIM command, clearing caches, etc. etc. You shouldn't interfere with these activities.

Something else you shouldn't do is to run scans on your own. That might have been a good idea back in Windows 9x or ME but not anymore. Windows does all this for you and I don't try to second guess it.

If you haven't already read up on what the volume shadow copy is I can explain. But you'll find much more in the way of details on the internet. Bottom line: Normal.