Errors

[AIANDAS]

Hi
I just got done with NTFS bad sectors in one machine now my dell with my
SATA drives is telling me that one of my partitions and/or drives has a some
errors. In particular the rror reads:
"CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the master file table
<MFT> bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows found problems with the file system. Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix)
option to correct these."
So sure enough I did CHKDSK /F and it still shows this bloody error. I used
my Seagate Seatools Diagnostics, the long drive selft test and it PASSED. Yet
windows stubbornly insists it's finding the aforementioned error. Any help on
this would be greatly appreciated before I send it back to Seagate. Thank you.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi
I just got done with NTFS bad sectors in one machine now my dell with my
SATA drives is telling me that one of my partitions and/or drives has a
some
errors. In particular the rror reads:
"CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the master file table
<MFT> bitmap.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap.
Windows found problems with the file system. Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix)
option to correct these."
So sure enough I did CHKDSK /F and it still shows this bloody error. I
used
my Seagate Seatools Diagnostics, the long drive selft test and it PASSED.
Yet
windows stubbornly insists it's finding the aforementioned error. Any help
on
this would be greatly appreciated before I send it back to Seagate. Thank
you.

There appear to be some misunderstandings here. You write about "NTFS
bad sectors". There is actually no such thing: You can have "bad clusters",
which is a hardware issue, or various issues with the NTFS file system,
which
relates to the logical structure of the file system. It's the same with your
SATA
disk: If chkdsk discovers a problem with the master file table then this is
a
file system problem. Running the Seagate diagnostic tool or sending the disk
back to Seagate is pointless since the hardware is perfectly OK.

If chkdsk.exe cannot fix the problem then I can see these options:
a) Live with the problem.
b) Check Google for advanced file system repair tools.
c) Rebuild the file system.

With option b) it is essential that you first back up all your essential
files.

With option c) you could do this:
1. Connect the problem disk to some other WinXP PC.
2. Use robocopy.exe to copy all files to a spare disk.
3. Repartition and reformat the problem disk.
4. Mark the System partition active.
5. Reverse Step 2.

 

[Rey Santos]

I you run CHKDSK without parameters - Read-only CHKDSK (like when it runs on
startups) you'll get this warning:
WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

Read this:
An explanation of CHKDSK and the new /C and /I switches
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q187941/

Note this paragraph:
Read-only CHKDSK will abort before it completes all three phases if it
encounters errors in earlier phases and is prone to falsely reporting errors
when in read-only mode. That is, CHKDSK may report that a disk is corrupted
even when there is no real corruption present. This can happen if NTFS
happens to modify areas of the disk on behalf of some program activity that
CHKDSK is examining at the same time. To verify a volume correctly, the
volume must be in a static state, and the only way to guarantee that state is
to lock the volume. CHKDSK only locks the volume when /F or /R (which implies
"F") is specified. Thus, you may need to run CHKDSK more than once to get it
to complete all stages in read-only mode.
continue reading on the page.