Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Windows 7: The Power of FSUTIL Command

FSUTIL is a powerful command-line utility that can provide very technical information about your computer's drives, or if utilized incorrectly can cause damage to the file system.
Note: To use this utility, it requires administrative permission on the local system.
Below are a few examples of different operations that the command can perform.

Queries volume information
E.g.: fsutil fsinfo volumeinfo c:

Queries NTFS specific volume information
E.g.: fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo c:

Creates a new file of a specified size
E.g.: fsutil file createnew C:\testfile.txt 1000

Warning: use this command at your own risk...
Below is a list of supported commands:
  • Type: fsutil 8dot3name: 8dot3name management
  • Type: fsutil behavior: Control file system behavior
  • Type: fsutil dirty: Manage volume dirty bit
  • Type: fsutil file: File specific commands
  • Type: fsutil fsinfo: File system information
  • Type: fsutil hardlink: Hardlink management
  • Type: fsutil objectid: Object ID management
  • Type: fsutil quota: Quota management
  • Type: fsutil repair: Self healing management
  • Type: fsutil reparsepoint: Reparse point management
  • Type: fsutil resource: Transactional Resource Manager management
  • Type: fsutil sparse: Sparse file control
  • Type: fsutil transaction: Transaction management
  • Type: fsutil usn: USN management
  • Type: fsutil volume: Volume management

2 comments:

jaroslav said...

Why is it useful to copy and paste the output of fsutil /help ? Please try and provide some information beyond the basic list of arguments.

PhilDur said...

Hi Jaroslav
If you want more documentation, go to the MSDN site you'll find more (if not everything ) about Fsutil.
It's there http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753059.aspx