Use the System File Checker tool to repair missing or corrupted system files

If some Windows functions aren’t working or Windows crashes, use the System File Checker to scan Windows and restore your files.

Though the steps below might look complicated at first glance, just follow them in order, step-by-step, and we’ll try to get you back on track.

Run the System File Checker tool (SFC.exe)

To do this, follow these steps:

Open an elevated command prompt. To do this, do the following as your appropriate:

If you are running Windows 10, Windows 8.1 or Windows 8, first run the inbox Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool prior to running the System File Checker. (If you are running Windows 7 or Windows Vista, skip to Step 3.)

Type the following command, and then press Enter. It may take several minutes for the command operation to be completed.

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth

Important: When you run this command, DISM uses Windows Update to provide the files that are required to fix corruptions. However, if your Windows Update client is already broken, use a running Windows installation as the repair source, or use a Windows side-by-side folder from a network share or from a removable media, such as the Windows DVD, as the source of the files. To do this, run the following command instead:

DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /Source: C:\RepairSource\Windows /LimitAccess

Note: Replace the C:\RepairSource\Windows placeholder with the location of your repair source. For more information about using the DISM tool to repair Windows, reference Repair a Windows Image.

At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

The sfc /scannow command will scan all protected system files, and replace corrupted files with a cached copy that is located in a compressed folder at %WinDir%\System32\dllcache.
The %WinDir% placeholder represents the Windows operating system folder. For example, C:\Windows.

Note Do not close this Command Prompt window until the verification is 100% complete. The scan results will be shown after this process is finished.

After the process is finished, you may receive one of the following messages:

Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.

This means that you do not have any missing or corrupted system files.

Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation.

To resolve this problem, perform the System File Checker scan in safe mode, and make sure that the PendingDeletes and PendingRenames folders exist under %WinDir%\WinSxS\Temp.

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them. Details are included in the CBS.Log %WinDir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log.

To view the detail information about the system file scan and restoration, go to How to view details of the System File Checker process.

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them. Details are included in the CBS.Log %WinDir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log.

Swipe in from the right edge of the screen, and then tap Search. Or, if you are using a mouse, point to the lower-right corner of the screen, and then click Search. Type Command Prompt in the Search box, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator. If you are prompted for an administrator password or for a confirmation, type the password, or click Allow.

To do this, click Start, type Command Prompt or cmd in the Search box, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator. If you are prompted for an administrator password or for a confirmation, type the password, or click Allow.

More Information

To view the details that included in the CBS.Log file, you can copy the information to the Sfcdetails.txt file by using the Findstr command, and then view the details in the Sfcdetails.txt. To do this, follow these steps:

Open an elevated command prompt as described in the previous step 1.

At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

Note The Sfcdetails.txt file contains details from every time that the System File Checker tool has been run on the computer. The file includes information about files that were not repaired by the System File Checker tool. Verify the date and time entries to determine the problem files that were found the last time that you ran the System File Checker tool.

Open the Sfcdetails.txt file from your desktop.

The Sfcdetails.txt file uses the following format:

Date/Time SFC detail The following sample log file contains an entry for a file that could not be repaired: 2007-01-12 12:10:42, Info CSI 00000008 [SR] Cannot repair member file [l:34<17>]»Accessibility.dll» of Accessibility, Version = 6.0.6000.16386, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_MSIL (8), Culture neutral, VersionScope neutral, PublicKeyToken = , Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, file is missing

How to manually replace a corrupted system file with a known good copy of the file

After you determine which system file was corrupted and could not be repaired through the detail information in the Sfcdetails.txt file, find where the corrupted file located, and then manually replace the corrupted file with a known good copy of the file. To do this, follow these steps:

Note You may be able to get a known good copy of the system file from another computer that is running the same version of Windows with your computer. You may perform a System File Checker process on that computer to make sure the system file that you intend to copy is a good copy.

Take administrative ownership of the corrupted system file. To do this, at an elevated command prompt, copy and then paste (or type) the following command, and then press ENTER:

takeown /f Path_And_File_Name Note The Path_And_File_Name placeholder represents the path and the file name of the corrupted file. For example, type takeown /f C:\windows\system32\jscript.dll.

Grant administrators full access to the corrupted system file. To do this, copy and paste (or type) the following command, and then press ENTER:

icacls Path_And_File_Name /GRANT ADMINISTRATORS:F Note The Path_And_File_Name placeholder represents the path and the file name of the corrupted file. For example, type icacls C:\windows\system32\jscript.dll /grant administrators:F.

Replace the corrupted system file with a known good copy of the file. To do this, copy and paste (or type) the following command, and then press ENTER:

Copy Source_File Destination Note The Source_File placeholder represents the path and file name of the known good copy of the file on your computer, and the Destination placeholder represents the path and file name of the corrupted file. For example, type copy E:\temp\jscript.dll C:\windows\system32\jscript.dll.

If the steps above don’t work, you may need to reinstall Windows. For more info, see Windows 10 recovery options.

How to Fix Corrupted Files in Windows 7/8/10?

How to fix corrupted files in Windows 7/8/10? Don’t worry about it. Just see below and here are 3 tested methods to fix corrupted boot files.

By Ivy / Last Updated September 14, 2020

What is a corrupted file?

The corrupted files are computer files that suddenly become inoperable or unusable.

In fact, every file on your system has certain structure and content. Thus, if the right information is in the right part of the files, it will work well. But if the wrong information is written to a file, or the right information is written in the wrong place, the data will be garbled and scrambled, leaving you with a corrupted file.

In general, a corrupted file will not open at all or show an error message when you try to open it. But it does not affect the original program. That’s to say, even if you have a corrupted word file, you still can open other word files and use Word as normal.

Why is the file corrupted?

No matter what wrong, there is a reason for it. See below and get the reasons for a corrupted file.

1. Your files corrupted during saving. For example, your computer loses power or crash as you save files, the files may be corrupted.

2. Bad sectors on hard drive or other storage devices.

3. Virus and malware on a hard drive or other storage devices.

4. Bad update on your computer

How to fix corrupted system files in Windows 7/8/10?

Method 1: Repair corrupted files using Windows built-in tool

This method is used to check bad sectors and repair it with Windows built-in tool. The detailed steps will be a little difference owing to different operating system, so I’ll show you in 2 parts.

Part 1: For Windows 7 users

Step 1. Go to the hard drive Properties window. You can open Computer, right-click the hard drive you want to check bad sectors and select Properties.

Step 2. Click Tools in Properties window.

Step 3. Click Check now in the Error-checking section.

Step 4. Tick Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors and hit Start.

Step 5. Review the check disk report

Part 2: For Windows 8/10 users

Step 1. Navigate to the hard drive Properties window. You can open This PC, right-click the system drive and select Properties.

Step 2. Click the Tools tab in this window

Step 3. Click the Check option under the Error-checking.

Step 4. Review the scan result and click Scan and repair drive.

Step 5. Choose When to repair the file system and wait for the final result.

Method 2: Fix corrupted system files in Windows 7 using system file checker

The SFC command is included in Windows 8/10, which is used to repair corrupted boot files in Windows 7/8/10. You can try it with the detailed steps in the following.

Step 1. Type cmd in the search box, right-click it and select Run as administrator.

Step 2. In the command prompt, type the following command and hit Enter. Then, just wait for the final result.

sfc/scannow

вњЋ Note: After scanning, you will receive one of the following messages, which will tell you if the corrupted boot files are repaired.

Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations. This message indicates that there are no missing or corrupted system files.

Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation. This message means that you need to run SFC command in the safe mode and make sure that the PendingDeletes and PendingRenames folders exist under %WinDir%\WinSxS\Temp.

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them.

Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them. This message means that you need to find the corrupted files and manually replace it with the right one. To view the details, you can go to CBS.Log %WinDir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log.

Method 3: Repair corrupted boot files with DISM command in Windows 7/8/10

How to fix corrupt files found in SFC Scannow but cannot fix for Windows 7/8/10? you could use DISM command line. It’s a replacement for SFC command line, especially when SFC scannow not working. Detailed steps are below.

Step 1. Run SFC command in Windows 8/10. If there is no problem, you can close cmd. But If you receive an error message like Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them, you should run DISM command.

Step 2. Run DISM command. You can type the following command in the command prompt and hit Enter.

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

Step 3. Wait and restart your computer to make the change available.

What to do after repairing corrupted system files?

To prevent your files from damaged again, you need to create a backup after repairing the corrupted files. For the common files, like music files, video files, word, excel, you could consider creating a file backup. For the system or boot files, like dll file, cbs.log files, you’d better perform system image backup, because manually selecting system file may omit some of these files.

To create a backup, you need a reliable backup and restore software like AOMEI Backupper Standard, which could help you backup all kinds of files, including the system files. And it provides you various schedule backup, including, daily, weekly, monthly, event-trigger, etc. Beside, it allows you to backup to external drives, USB drives, NAS, network share.

Here, I’ll take file backup as an example and show you the detailed steps.

Step 1. Download AOMEI Backupper Standard, install and launch it.

Step 2. Click Backup and File Backup. To backup system files, click System Backup.

Step 3. To select files or folders to backup, you can click Add File or Add Folder.

Step 4. Set up a destination path for your backup and click Start Backup.

If you want to backup files with certain file extension, you could consider using File Filter.

If you modify your files frequently, you’d better create a differential backup, which only backup the changed files.

If your target drive is USB, you could create a schedule backup with USB plugged in. After the first backup, this software will automatically backup files when the drive is connected to your computer.

Sooner or later, your backup drive will be fulfilled if you don’t delete old backups. To avoid this situation, you could enable backup scheme, which will delete backup files at a specific role.

These features mentioned above is only available on the paid version. If needed, you could consider upgrading to the Professional or Server edition. It depends on your operating system.

Summary

Up to now, how to fix corrupted files in Windows 7/8/10 is still an outstanding issue. No one dares to say that there is a way to fix all the corrupted files.To keep your files safe and intact, you need to create a file backup or system backup. It’s an exact copy of your files, which can protect against file corruption.

If you want to protect unlimited computers within your company, you could pick AOMEI Backupper Technician. With the inbuilt AOMEI Image Deploy tool, you are also allowed to deploy/restore system image file on server-side computer to multiple client-side computers over network.