think it does: If the system discovers NTFS corruption, it throws a blue screen of death and shuts everything down instead of attempting to spot fix it.

This may sound counterintuitive: Why would you want the system to crash in such a circumstance? But the idea is to stop the system from doing anything that might corrupt data, including attempting a repair, which could do more damage.

Although triggering a bug check may be extreme, it allows you to stop everything and make an image of the disk, or a backup of the most crucial data, before attempting a repair operation with chkdsk.

To turn on BugCheckOnCorrupt, issue the following command from an admin privilege command line:

    fsutil behavior set BugcheckOnCorrupt 1

Reboot and then issue the following command, again from an administrative command line, for each drive you want to check:

    fsutil repair set <drive name> 0x10

The command fsutil repair query <drive name> determines the repair status for a given drive. To disable BugCheckOnCorrupt for a particular drive, use fsutil repair set <drive name> 0x1; to turn it off completely systemwide, use fsutil behavior set BugCheckOnCorrupt 0.

Remember, you don't have to set BugCheckOnCorrupt unless you have doubts about the quality of your disk hardware.

Chkdsk and BugCheckOnCorrupt are critical utilities for monitoring Windows 7 systems. Knowing how to use them can help you when hardware goes bad.