Windows provides command line tool named fsutils to manage disk related issues. This tool provides management capabilities volume information to repairing file system, setting quotas to listing free space. In this tutorial we will look most needed usage scenarios of the fsutil command.

Help

Help about fsutil command can be get with just issuing the command.

$ fsutil

List All Drives

While troubleshooting or diagnosing a problem first thing we will do is listing installed drives. All drives connected on the system can be listed with the following command.

$ fsutil fsinfo drives

We have only one drive current installed

Print Drive Type

Drive type is generally refer to the drive connection to the system. Local disk are generally used to install operating systems. In order to store data SAN storage is preferred. Disk type will give exact type of the drive.

$ fsutil fsinfo drivetype c:

As we can see C: is a fixed and locally mounted drive.

Print Volume Information

Volumes have file system related features. These features can be listed with the following command. In this example we will list volume C: file system information.

$ fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo c:

This command will provide following information:

• Volume Name
• Volume Serial Number
• File System Length
• Supports
  • Case-sensitive File Names
  • Unicode File Names
  • File based Compression
  • Disk Quotas
  • Sparse Files
  • Reparse Files
  • Object Identifiers
  • Encrypted File System
  • Named Streams
  • Transactions
  • Hard Links
  • Extended Attributes
  • USN Journals
• Preserves & Enforce ACL’s

List File System Information

File systems holds all the data about operating systems, user files etc. Some information about the file system can be listed with the following command. We will list NTFS file system information of the drive C:

$ fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

As we can see from screenshot following information is printed about ntfs file system.

• Version will print NTFS file system version
• Number Sectors
• Total Clusters
• Free Clusters
• Total Reserved
• Bytes Per Sector
• Bytes Per Cluster
• Bytes Per FileRecord Segment
• Mft Valid Data Length`
• and other Mft related information

Print Free Space

Free space on the volume can be printed with the following command.

$ fsutil volume diskfree c:

The sizes are printed as byte.

Repair File System

File systems are generally designed to be error prone and error corrective. But changes can change and file system can become corrupted. This corrupted file system can be corrected and repaired with the following command. c: is the the we want to set automatic repair with 1 . Also if we give 0 according to 1 this will make unset automatic repair operation.

$ fsutils repair set c: 1