How can I force windows 7 to run sfc?

My hard drive has some corrupted system files where windows explorer keeps resetting in a loop every time I try to boot windows. I thought maybe I could just fix the problem easily with a system restore, but that didn't fix the issue. I then tried using the windows system recovery (option when you boot hitting f8) and pulling up the command prompt and using "sfc /scannow", but it comes back saying the system is being restored and needs to be rebooted before it can run the diagnostic, but I can't let it restore since it never boots correctly. Any way to force it to run the sfc utility?