G
Guest
For starters, I'm a technically-oriented IT pro with over 35 years working in the computer industry. In addition, I have over 22 years working on PCs running a variety of operating systems. So, I'm both thorough AND highly experienced when it comes to analyzing and diagnosing hardware and software problems.
I'm running XP Home Edition on a Compaq Presario Laptop model 1510. Attached to this machine via the 1394 firewire port are two 250GB external Maxtor hard drives which are formatted using the NTFS file system. It's worth noting here that these two hard drives contain a relatively small number VERY large AVI data files which average 15 - 20 gb apiece and that one drive is essentially used as a static backup of the files stored on the other. In short, drive E is used to store backups of the files that were originally captured and stored on drive F in case of a calamity involving drive F. I say it is a static backup because there's no effort to maintain the drive dynamically (i.e. no ghost utility or anything like that). These AVI files rarely change. I only use them as my source to create videos.
Yesterday, while running a defrag on one of those two 250GB hard drives, my system suddenly shut down with an apparent temperature problem. It has had this problem for months but Compaq has been unable to fix it -- advising me instead that I "shouldn't use my computer so hard". (I kid you not!)
Anyway, I came back to the machine yesterday to find it had powered off and the defrag had suddenly been terminated. This morning, in an effort to see whether any damage had been done (write caching is disabled on both of these drives, so there should not have been any damage.) , I ran chkdsk/f on the drive that was being defragged when the failure occured and chkdsk found (and I very carefully wrote down) nineteen files which it claimed had bad clusters and of course it also claimed to have fixed those errors. But later, when I ran the chkdsk/f again on the same drive to verify that the errors had indeed been corrected, I found that chkdsk reported the exact same errors in the exact same list of 19 files that it had found and (supposedly) corrected the first time and of course, once again it claimed to have fixed the errors!
At this point, I got quite curious. So, I ran chkdsk/f again on the backup drive (i.e. the one that was NOT being defraged when the system shutdown occured) and low and behold, chkdsk reported the exact same errors on the same 19 files on THAT drive PLUS errors on four other Windows backup drive images (which also average over 20gb in size) that were also stored on that drive but were NOT on the first drive. In short, chkdsk found, reported and supposedly corrected the exact same errors on the a nearly identical set of files stored on two different hard drives.
As a result of this exercise, I strongly suspect I've encountered a BUG in chkdsk which causes it to report errors erroneously on very large data files stored on an NTFS file system. I've checked the Microsoft knowledge base on both chksk and the NTFS file system but naturally found no mention of such a problem.
Has anyone else encountered or reported what are apparently spurious errors like this from chkdsk?
Thanks!
I'm running XP Home Edition on a Compaq Presario Laptop model 1510. Attached to this machine via the 1394 firewire port are two 250GB external Maxtor hard drives which are formatted using the NTFS file system. It's worth noting here that these two hard drives contain a relatively small number VERY large AVI data files which average 15 - 20 gb apiece and that one drive is essentially used as a static backup of the files stored on the other. In short, drive E is used to store backups of the files that were originally captured and stored on drive F in case of a calamity involving drive F. I say it is a static backup because there's no effort to maintain the drive dynamically (i.e. no ghost utility or anything like that). These AVI files rarely change. I only use them as my source to create videos.
Yesterday, while running a defrag on one of those two 250GB hard drives, my system suddenly shut down with an apparent temperature problem. It has had this problem for months but Compaq has been unable to fix it -- advising me instead that I "shouldn't use my computer so hard". (I kid you not!)
Anyway, I came back to the machine yesterday to find it had powered off and the defrag had suddenly been terminated. This morning, in an effort to see whether any damage had been done (write caching is disabled on both of these drives, so there should not have been any damage.) , I ran chkdsk/f on the drive that was being defragged when the failure occured and chkdsk found (and I very carefully wrote down) nineteen files which it claimed had bad clusters and of course it also claimed to have fixed those errors. But later, when I ran the chkdsk/f again on the same drive to verify that the errors had indeed been corrected, I found that chkdsk reported the exact same errors in the exact same list of 19 files that it had found and (supposedly) corrected the first time and of course, once again it claimed to have fixed the errors!
At this point, I got quite curious. So, I ran chkdsk/f again on the backup drive (i.e. the one that was NOT being defraged when the system shutdown occured) and low and behold, chkdsk reported the exact same errors on the same 19 files on THAT drive PLUS errors on four other Windows backup drive images (which also average over 20gb in size) that were also stored on that drive but were NOT on the first drive. In short, chkdsk found, reported and supposedly corrected the exact same errors on the a nearly identical set of files stored on two different hard drives.
As a result of this exercise, I strongly suspect I've encountered a BUG in chkdsk which causes it to report errors erroneously on very large data files stored on an NTFS file system. I've checked the Microsoft knowledge base on both chksk and the NTFS file system but naturally found no mention of such a problem.
Has anyone else encountered or reported what are apparently spurious errors like this from chkdsk?
Thanks!
