On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:46:03 -0700, Paulie
I think it is beyond time that we had a proper interactive file system
maintenance tool for NTFS. ChkDsk is a relic from the MS-DOS 5 days;
I wish NT would at least catch up to, say, MS-DOS 6 Scandisk.
Now folks will flame me for saying that. "File systems are too
complex for users to understand, just trust us to fix everything for
you". Fine; let's read on and see how well that works...
My new Notebook is unable to run a CHKDSK with the Fix option selected.
I can run a normal CHKDSK within VISTA and it works without a problem.
If I choose the Fix option it schedules a scan on the next boot. Upon
rebooting,
CHKDSK will begin but it will freeze after 8% of the scan. The
Notebook does not respond and I have to power it down and restart.
Great, so now we combine a possibly corrupted file system in need of
repair, with recurrent bad exits. What's wrong with this picture?
Any idea what this may be?
Given that ChkDsk and AutoChk are closed boxes with little or no
documentation of what they are doing (and little or no feedback to you
while they are doing it), one can only guess.
My guesses would be one of:
1) Physically failing HD
When a sector can't be read, the HD will retry the operation a number
of times before giving up. Whatever driver code that calls the
operation will probably also retry a few times, before giving up, and
so may the higher-level code that called that, etc.
The result can be an apparent "hang" lasting seconds to minutes while
the system beats the dying disk to death.
That's before you factor in futile attepts to paper over the problem
and pretend it isn't there, both by the HD itself, and by the NTFS
code. Each will attempt to read the sick allocation unit's data and
write it to a "good" replacement, then switch usage so that the dead
sector is avoided in future. And so on, for next dead sector, etc.
2) Lengthy repair process
Scandisk and ChkDsk have no "big picture" awareness. If they were
you, walking from A to B, they would take a step, calculate if they
were at B, then take another, and repeat. If they were walking in the
wrong direction, away from B, they'd just keep on walking forever.
So when something happens that invalidates huge chunks of the file
system, these tools don't see the "big picture" and STOP and say "hey,
something is invalidating the way this file system is viewed". No;
they look at one atom of the file system, change it to fit the current
view, and repeat for the next. If that means changing evey atom in
the file system, that is what they will do. Result; garbage.
3) Bugginess
Whereas (2) is a bad design working as designed, sometimes the code
doesn't work as designed and falls off the edge.
Needless to say, AutoChk and ChkDsk don't maintain any undoability.
They also "know better than you", so they don't stop and ask you
before "fixing" things, they just wade in and start slashing away.
I have run full virus scans and updates on the drive and
there are no issues. Other than this the Notebook runs fine. Its just a
strange issue that i am unable to fix at this stage.
I would at least exclude (1) by checking the HD's surface using the
appropriate tests in HD Tune (
www.hdtune.com), after backing up my
data. You should be able to get a "second opinion" on the file
system, but you can't; ChkDsk and AutoChk are all you have.
--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -
To one who only has a hammer,
everything looks like a nail
