Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Redesigns chkdsk For Windows 8, Improves NTFS Health Model
MojoKid writes "Microsoft can't do anything to magically make hard drives stop failing when parts go bad, but Redmond is rolling out a new NTFS health model for Windows 8 with a redesigned chkdsk tool for disk corruption detection and fixing. In past versions of the chkdsk and NTFS health model, the file system volume was either deemed healthy or not healthy. In Windows 8, Microsoft is changing things up. Rather than hours of downtime, Windows 8 splits the process into phases that include 'Detect Corruption,' 'Online Self-Healing,' 'Online Verification,' 'Online Identification & Logging,' and 'Precise & Rapid Correction.'"
Unless you use 'Precise & Rapid Correction.'
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
Will I need a quad core minimum to run this?
1. Your data has disappeared (detect corruption).
2. Hit self on head with brick because your data wasn't backed up (online self-healing)
3. Hit self on head again to see if your data has reappeared (online verification)
4. Identify brick by matching to lumps on head (online identification and logging)
5. Give brick to neighbor's kid to hit you on head with again (precise and rapid correction)
Why is Online Self Healing different and from "Make the damn FS work properly"?
WTF FS is that has problems that can be fixed online?
Rethinking email
Considering that the current chkdsk is actually capable of causing massive logical damage , Microsoft has a LONG way to go to make it function as intended.
here the highlight.
if disk.mbr.has_grub
for part in disc.partitions
if part.type.not_ours
chair.throw() # dammit... let's do something about it
part.raw_write(offset=random(1,part.size),data=random(1,255)) # voila'
end if
end for
end if
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I'm glad that this does not mean over the internet.
Given the other phase names, I surprised the marketing department didn't call this "Detect Awesomeness!".
chkdsk is a standalone app. Can I use v8 on my v7 OS?
...sounds like M$ is copying spinrite.
I was curious as to why MS is continuing on with NTFS, surely there must be something newer coming out of their R&D labs. So a quick google turned up this from the same blog, but earlier this year: building the next generation file system for windows refs
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Ah, finally, all those Online-something goodies for chkdsk. I've always wanted to have Windows Activation Wizard popping up before my chkdsk session, just in case I was in doubt was my copy legitimate. (It is btw)
Ah, glad to see some of the spirit and philosophy of DiskDoctor has made it over to Windows. I wonder if that 'repair' utility actually ever worked for anyone ever.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
* DONE!
(Yes, it's THAT simple vs. hosts-domain based threats which ARE THE MAJORITY OF THEM OUT THERE (because hosts-domain names are recyclable unlike IP addresses)... &, it works - you CAN'T be burned if you can't go into the malware kitchen!) No more malware, no disk corruption!
This concept & technique is VERY simple to understand, as far as how to install a custom HOSTS file, how to get data to populate it (& if need be? An Access import & "SELECT * DISTINCT FROM (tablename) ORDER BY ASC" type query & export can do the deduplication/normalization end even).
E.G.-> I've taught it to people who have NO CLUE in computing in fact, & they took to it like ducks to water - especially custom editing their custom HOSTS file with text editors once they understand what speeds them up (hardcodes) & secures them + how, by blocking out bogus sites/servers!
(And? Heck - They ought to like it & take to them fast! Especially considering a custom HOSTS file acts as a security layer AND more-or-less, an "online turbocharger" for speed too, for free! You already own one anyhow, with any OS that uses a BSD based IP stack (which IS most))...
P.S.=> Of course, your HOSTS file will need to have the domain/hosts name of the C&C servers, & that you have to obtain for this to work vs. threats like bogus servers &/or maliciously scripted sites. Here's some good sources for that above & beyond mvps.org (I noted them above):
http://hosts-file.net/?s=Download
http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt
http://mirror1.malwaredomains.com/files/ (justdomains here)
http://pgl.yoyo.org/as/serverlist.php?hostformat=hosts&showintro=1&mimetype=plaintext
http://sysctl.org/cameleon/hosts
http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/
http://hostsfile.org/hosts.html
http://hostsfile.mine.nu/downloads/
https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/monitor.php?filter=lastupdated
https://spyeyetracker.abuse.ch/monitor.php?filter=lastupdated
http://www.malwareurl.com/
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/ (updater for Spybot "Search & Destroy" & it fortifies HOSTS files)
Those are some of my regular sources that are reputable & reliable for custom HOSTS file data populations vs. known threats online - I consolidate them here via programs I wrote that normalize/deduplicate repeated entries, sort/alphabetize the results, & change from larger + slower 127.0.0.1 (longer & loopback ops happen here) to the faster & smaller 0.0.0.0 (or even 0 on Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003): Enjoy!
While I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any means, I do recognize that a majority of companies around the world still utilize a variety Microsoft OSes, and they tend to push ideas that, while usually not totally original, become accepted by the mainstream. Frankly Microsoft's programming has gotten a lot more stream-lined and user friendly of late, particularly for IT in small companies(not to say that it's perfect...). I am interested to see how Server 8, Azure, Office 15, Windows 8, and even Windows Phone 8 and Xbox 360 mesh. I want to see what tools become truly effective and meaningful where data transfer and preservation is concerned (i.e. small things like Disk Pooling and chkdsk to system-wide backup routines etc.). At home, I would love to back-up vital files on the unused 150GB on my Xbox 360 with the click of a button, without having to buy yet another portable drive. Even pooling drive space between my PC, 360, and Windows Phone (no, I don't have a Windows Phone) would be awesome. Just little things that true integration between systems could make possible in the near future are kind of nice to consider.
Of course, all of this is already possible in some form or another, but I'm talking functionality built into these multiple systems at retail.
A FAT USB drive (or Android phone) doesn't need to be 'safely removed'. You can just yank the thing and it's fine (as long as it's finished its r/w operations).
These two statements are mutually exclusive. The translation of your post, once only the facts remain, is "I hate windows." Why didnt you just say that you hate windows?
"His name was James Damore."
It still hangs at 100% CPU for no apparent reason even after 20 years.
This is good news! I still swear by running chkdsk /f after power loss or hard reset, even with Windows 7...I've had a few cases where there was some corruption and Windows didn't give a warning about it.
Also, it's about time NTFS got upgraded. Extents, checksums, etc. are no longer new and unnecessary.
Why is Online Self Healing different and from "Make the damn FS work properly"?
"Online Self Healing" : copyrightable
"Make the damn FS work properly" : probably not copyrightable; and
"Online Self Healing" : something to market to the technically naive (think CTO) - easy to SELL fix to the gullible as a FEATURE for $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
"Make the damn FS work properly" : sounds a tad like criticism of one of the scads of obvious weaknesses of the past couple of decades - hard to SELL fix as a FEATURE even to the technically naive
The Professional Edition will include a DVD of Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley, in case the user blames himself for the computer's failure during stressful times.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Linux runs so reliably with ext4, package management, and all that that things like "chkdsk" and "self-healing" sound oddly quaint and old-fashioned.
En garde!!!
... ... ...
I don't know if this is the real APK or not. Wow.
I wonder what entries he adds or removes from his hosts file when his car doesn't start.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I thought making sure that all read/write operations have finished was the point of "safely remove".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Considering that the current chkdsk is actually capable of causing massive logical damage , Microsoft has a LONG way to go to make it function as intended.
You mean it's suspected of causing additional damage in a couple of comments.
It's very possible that there are long standing bugs. It's also possible that it just tried very hard on a hopelessly borked drive and failed.
I looked in to disabling it, and it
See, truncated data. That's what happens when you remove without unmounting.
Seriously. Your strategy puts at risk all the writes during that rebuild process.
You can just yank the thing and it's fine
This is true if you've set the drive's caching policy to "optimize for quick removal" rather than "optimize for performance". (Names are from memory and may not be exact.) "Optimize for quick removal", which Windows turns on automatically for removable media drives, syncs the file system continuously.
(as long as it's finished its r/w operations).
The trouble is figuring out when this has happened, as a lot of USB mass storage devices don't have a blinking access light. Only one of my USB flash drives has one, and my Android device does not. As maxwell demon pointed, out, the "safely remove" on a removable drive is useful for making sure that all writes have completed.
Microsoft can't do anything to magically make hard drives stop failing when parts go bad
Yes, we know. Since when did /. become so patronising?
I remember being told not to run chkdsk on my ext2 volumes because a) there was no need and b) more harm than good. I never once ran it on a Linux desktop. And forget about defrag. Is there some reason NTFS can't do this?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It can't be—he only signed it once.
How can chkdisk fix corrupted hardware? Yes, "disk corruption" is about hardware, not about a filesystem. It would need low level interfaces to the actual controllers (these days inside the drive) and do things most vendor support software doesn't even do. So the summary is blatantly wrong, you can't fix a broken disk with chkdsk, not even the new version.
What they are actually doing is classifying 18 different forms of filesystem corruptions and are building the OS and filesystem drivers in such a way that they can fix a few of them online and do analysis of the ones they can't fix while the filesystem is online, so they can fix them later without having to scan the entire filesystem. That means that only the actual repair might require the filesystem to be put offline for a limited time and in general does not need a reboot. How they plan to do this without accidental overwriting of lost clusters is a mystery to me, but they must have thought about this.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Wake me up when there's pervasive Reed-Solomon error correction everywhere.
yeah youre right, its decades by now.
do you mean failed to INNOVATE?? rofl /ducks chair
*Volume doesn't need to dismount to run CHKDSK; it's modus operandi is now very volume shadow copy-esque.
*Windows will run an online "disk health check service".
*If a the NTFS Driver finds an issue with the disk, It reports it to the "disk health check service".
*The "disk health check service" then runs chkdsk on just the defective file, or of needed, the entire drive, fixing the problem upfront before it can corrode and make things worse.
*The Disk health check service will give you a nice bar graph, pie chart, or health bar to see how healthy the disk is. (Read: The market-speak is brutally thick in this article.)
Long story short: This is handy for maintaining fileservers and RAID 1 arrays; for the average single-disk machine, basically it covers up hardware failure. Oh, and it'll improve the security of the OS since most viruses that do low-level editing of a disk don't re-write the CRC32 at the end of the cluster, thus the OS will detect the bad cluster and replace it from backup (Windows File Protection Services).
Set up event viewer on the domain to report all disk errors to a single system and report anything on Disk 0. If a machine ever gets a disk 0 error, replace the disk. It WILL fail a surface scan 100% of the time. End of story.
At least it did in 1996. There was one guy doing all of HPFS back then, and it was the hayday of OS/2 Warp 4. And the death watch, too, because we all know how that went. Doodoo? Oh, right, DoDo !!
Yeah, kinda like the *NIXs dropped fsck so long ago.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The new Windows 8 chkdsk program detects corruption... if you try to use it in Washington D.C., for example, it goes crazy and shits itself, curls up in a ball and cries while sucking its thumb.
The number 1 feature I want in current filesystems is block-level checksums.
I've had to perform data recovery for a number of people recently (yes, backups help, but sometimes having them just 24 hours out of date means there are advantages to attempting to recover the data off the failed or failing drive or array)
Now, using a combination of tools I've been able to get the faulty drive to give me back data, but I've got no way whatsoever of knowing if the data it's given back to me is actually the data that was stored on it in the first place.
Having end-to-end checksums would easily allow me to assign a confidence level to data recovery procedures, letting me know that the data I have retrieved is what was stored - it would also allow better control over operations like fsck or chkdsk if the blocks that hold metadata are also checksummed, that way it would be possible to tell if a block has been randomly corrupted somehow, or if it's stored as intended.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
By the time you've got enough fragmented files to cause problems it's usually time to move everything to a bigger disk anyway. If it isn't, the easy (but time consuming) way is to copy everything off and then back again. Since there's no hidden system files and no requirement to just dump the files immediately all over the disk in fragements it just works - no tool more complex than cp, tar or rsync required.
Windows fanboys shouldn't take it as an insult - different priorities and different approaches result in different behaviour. NTFS dumps those files down almost ASAP so fragmentation is very common - other filesystems buffer more and are prepared to wait longer for that disk to spin around again so fragmentation is very rare, especially is there is something like NFS in the middle. The fragmentation is a throwback to MSDOS and the need for quick removal of floppy disks versus the *nix approach where the thing won't let you unmount anything until it's really sure everything is done and the user just has to put up with the wait.
Hardware dies if nothing else.
Cutting the power on a modern file system also results in it having to finish what it was up to when the lights went out.
See subject-line, & impersonating me here was weak -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2846161&cid=39981271
APK
P.S.=> Trolls here on /. are sinking to NEW "lows" yet again... apk
See subject, & IF the "best you've got", trolls, is impersonating me? U FAIL!
* I must have BADLY 'spanked' the fool that's impersonating me here now -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2846161&cid=39981271
(Since he has to resort to *trying* to impersonate me here on /. in order to discredit me... and, I'll state a fact to correct the idiot attempting to impersonate me here now: No - hosts files do NOT fix or prevent disk corruption OR filesystem errors, period...)
APK
P.S.=> Bottom-Line: Whoever's impersonating me now is a total loser and obviously is suffering from "geek angst" @ this point, in impersonating me in the link above here in this article thread's comment exchanges, no questions asked!
Yes - it's obvious whoever's doing it has taken such a beating from me before, all they have now is attempting to impersonate me (instead of directly facing me in a conversation/debate I actually DID start, but then, I never lose those so, this is the result - attempts @ impersonating me in some WEAK attempt @ discrediting me instead)... apk
Microsoft v. Motorola: using or abusing the legal system? The two consumer technology powerhouses are embroiled in a spectrum of legal debate over decade-old patents. http://bit.ly/IYHYrD
Does this really deserve a whole article on Slashdot and why are you talking in fake rapper slang, like off The Wire?
"In Windows 8, Microsoft is changing things up"
AccountKiller
"It seems like Microsoft is really going out of it's way to innovate in Windows 8 ...
List of File Systems
AccountKiller
fsck with ext4 takes literally seconds for 100s of GB. It is so fast, I am using it every time I mount my backup medias. For example 100GB encrypted partition: [~] # time fsck /dev/mapper/read-snap
fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
e2fsck 1.41.14 (22-Dec-2010)
read: clean, 880109/6406144 files, 22357360/25599488 blocks
real 0m0.184s
user 0m0.022s
sys 0m0.010s
So it just took 0.2 Sec for the check, whereas the Windows chkdsk takes a few minutes. I don't know what chkdsk does, why it takes so long. But as long as chkdsk takes minutes, it is just garbage. How about to make it perform in seconds (or fraction of seconds) just like fsck with ext4 (or ext2, ext3 it was).
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Most binaries which use libraries (dll's) have a very specific search pattern which is being followed. First the current directory, then \windows\system32, then (iirc) \windows and then the searchpath.
So yes, its perfectly doable. If chkdsk.exe uses specific new dll's simply put the .exe and .dll's into a separate directory and you should be good to go.
If windows wasn't logging so much information to send to micro$oft (google microsoft start men usage demographics) and probably the FBI/CIA/InsertAgencyNameHere at this point, it wouldn't be thrashing the drive as much as it does to cause the corruption in the first place. My Kubuntu system won't even touch the swap most of the time let alone perform write operations 100 times a sec.