Repairing Win7 autochk "Cannot open volume for direct Access" error after power loss

My Win7 PC recently lost power while it was doing heavy work (compiling my latest android app). The result was file system corruption that could not be fixed the normal way (by scheduling to run chkdsk during bootup).  Here's the very useful error message Win7 gave me:

 Checking file system on C:
Cannot open volume for direct access
Autochk cannot run due to an error caused by a recently installed software package.  Use system restore....
An unspecified error occurred (766f6c756d652e63 3f1)

 I doubt a power failure really counts as installing a software package, MicroSoft.

 What's going on here is unclear, but the problem persists; no amount of rebooting and running chkdsk at bootup fixes it, you always get this message. Nor could I run chkdsk while the OS is fully loaded (since it's my C drive).

 But there is a solution, it seems. Reboot into system repair mode (F8 during boot up), and then select the command prompt. Find you C drive (it almost certainly won't be labeled as C; in my case it was H), and run chkdsk /r on it. For some reason it does not let the file system corruption prevent the scan here. The process is slow: on my mostly full 110GB SSD drive (samsung 840), it took a good 30 minutes. But it found and fixed the errors and now my PC can boot properly. Somewhat oddly the scan concluded with "Failure to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50." but this seems to be non-fatal. 


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