Vista Disk Checking Annoyance

It's a good practice in computer maintenance to periodically run a filesystem or disk check. This can alert you if your hard drive is showing signs of failure so that you can take the appropriate measures. In Windows XP and Vista, if you try to run a disk check on the same drive that the OS installation, then Windows informs you that it must schedule the check to run on the next reboot.

Because hard drives are so large, I generally reboot at the end of the day and let the disk check run overnight. Certainly, it doesn't take the whole night, but at least I'm not sitting there waiting. Last night, I forgot to reboot, so I was a little surprised by the disk checking messages when I restarted the computer today.

Before the disk check starts, it gives you 10 seconds to press a key to cancel the check. But all my button mashing was to no avail. Though I'm not 100% sure, I think it's because I'm using a USB keyboard. No problem. I have a PS/2 keyboard laying around. To my extreme annoyance however, my PC (a relatively new Dell) does not have PS/2 connectors. It has nearly a dozen USB ports, but nothing for legacy mice and keyboards. Rebooting is no help since the disk check utility restarts automatically. So basically an entire afternoon wasted with a useless computer.

Contrast this scenario with both Linux and OS X, where you can run fsck and/or Disk Utility without rebooting. True, the computer is noticeably slower during the process, but it's not offline and it's not unusable.