Windows 10: Disable folder selection prompt in Microsoft Defender Antivirus scans

Hello Community,Whenever I attempt to manually scan a file or folder using Microsoft Defender Antivirus, it prompts me to select a folder. This differs from my experience with other antivirus software such as McAfee, where this step isn't necessary. Could anyone please clarify why Microsoft Defender Antivirus requires folder selection for scanning? Additionally, if this step is not essential, is there a way to disable this option? Any advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated.OS: Windows 11 ProThank you.

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defender scans

Hi Ian,

Thanks for posting your query on Microsoft Community.

This issue might occur if you have set any task scheduler for Windows Defender.

I suggest you to delete the task for Windows defender and check if it helps.

Follow the below steps:

• 
  Search and open Schedule tasks.
  
• 
  In the left-hand menu, open the Task Scheduler Library, then select
  Microsoft >Windows >Windows Defender.
  
• 
  Double-click Windows Defender Scheduled Scan.
  
• 
  Select the Triggers panel, then select Delete.
  

Hope it helps, reply to us with the status of your issue. We will be happy to assist you.

 

How to disable Windows Defender 'Health Scan'?

Okay, Dalchina,

Here's the results of that scan:





And under Reliability History, I do see unexpected shutdowns every couple of days:





And under Technical Details, this is typical:




Does this suggest anything? Not sure what 'Blue Screen' means there. Same "Code: 10000ea" for each shutdown.

 

Microsoft Defender Offline Scan

Restored the Macrium Image and got my Recovery partitions back:






So as expected, I had a bunch of updates to do:





After the updates, I gave Microsoft Defender Offline a try and it worked!









And this just shows that I'm back at the latest version build of 20H2:





This one was my fault and I admit I was the culprit of my own troubles. It was just a coincidence that I used Partition Wizard around the same time the Cumulative Updates were going on from Oct 28th to November 11th and it gave me the suspicion to suspect them being responsible for the Offline scan problem.

I mean who the heck would of ever thought that a Recovery Partition would have anything to do with an Offline Scan in an Online world?

A special thanks to OldNavyGuy for his suggestion that a Windows Recovery Partition being deleted was the problem.