Software giant Microsoft has decided to improve the Chkdsk sofware to make the  process faster and less disruptive.

Chkdsk has been revamping the way Windows 8 monitors hard disks  and detects problems in an effort to make the diagnostic and repair process less intrusive and disruptive. It has been with us for ages but as disk sizes have become bigger, its job has become more difficult.

In Windows 8 it looks like the ChkDsk utility will get a revamp to speed it up. Microsoft also tweaked NTFS, the Windows OS file system so that the NTFS "health model" conceived the machine's hard disk as a single unit that was either well or damaged, and took the machine completely offline and made unavailable to the end user while ChkDsk ran.

In Windows 8, however, the NTFS scans for problems in the background while the system remains online, and an initial attempt to fix problems on-the-fly.