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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.'"
sane precautions with your data such as RAID and/or backing up your information
RAID and backing up should never be considered an "OR".
.. "RAID is not a backup strategy".
Repeat after me
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
"Online" as in "don't dismount the disk while we fix it, so you can continue to use it".
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
Given the other phase names, I surprised the marketing department didn't call this "Detect Awesomeness!".
Er, because any filesystem can have nonfatal minor errors? For example a filesystem that uses a bitmap to track free space (like NTFS does) can have that bitmap corrupted by bad sectors or whatever. Things like that are sufficiently simple that you can attempt a repair while the volume is online, without major risk of failure.
chkdsk is a standalone app. Can I use v8 on my v7 OS?
You must spend more time actually working with non-Windows systems. Multiple filesystems, most free, some commercial have been doing these sorts of things, and more for YEARS.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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?
Right up until your primary gets some corruption and proceeds to mirror it to the other.
It seems like Microsoft is really going out of it's way to innovate in Windows 8. I just hope both Apple and Linux developers would add something similar, as it's hard drive failure can lead to huge problems. Yes, you can use RAID or something, but that will bring costs significantly up. It's better to see these things before failure actually happens.
Rather than take sane precautions with your data such as RAID and/or backing up your information, you want a warning 1 minute before your drive fails?
1 minute should be more than enough for anybody.
Just delete an important file or directory on a RAID1 and see how much that "backup" protected you. Or install a virus. Or have data corruption on a disk.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I don't think it is. I think it's another of those far-too-obvious ones like "googlewatch" and "apple-fan" which I think have just been set up to troll.
If it's being paid for (as we;re meant to believe has been going on for ages) then the subtlety level has dropped an order of magnitude.
Also, the names of the accounts are all highly suspect - this one just so happens to be named after the programming language used in OS X and iOS? Come on!
No.
What happens if, say, you get a virus, or your app goes haywire, and The Critical Irreplaceable File gets corrupted or deleted?
RAID protects from hardware failures. It does nothing against software or human errors. And given my history with hardware, software and people, I'd say the first is generally the most reliable.
Defrag and indexing is automatically disabled on a SSD
int main() { while(1) fork(); }
En garde!!!
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.
To bad it will not be able to play the DVD ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Seriously. Your strategy puts at risk all the writes during that rebuild process.
That only "backs up" against drive failure. What happens if something gets deleted? What happens if a process goes mad and scribbles all over something important? What if someone breaks in?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
RAM is cheap. Why not use it?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Kindly have your own reading comprehension checked.
Non-Windows does NOT automatically and exclusively mean Linux.
Also, once that reactionary rash of yours stops flaring up, go investigate what ZFS and its tools, such as scrub, can do for people who care about data integrity.
Also, in your detailed reading of the article, did you note, for example, "NTFS detects", "NTFS attempts", "NTFS validates", "healing feature built into NTFS",
"introduced a new file system (emphasis added) ReFS"
Here, have another look: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/09/redesigning-chkdsk-and-the-new-ntfs-health-model.aspx
It seems the lighting under your troll bridge is, well, a bit dim.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
If there is one thing you can count on in the world, it's someone screaming "RAID is not a backup!" at the top of their lungs in any conversation dealing with RAID.
Yes, thank you. We get it. RAID does not protect against deleted files, etc. You can go back to shouting other contrarian favorites in other threads.
In the mean time, if and when one of the drives in my RAID-1 mirror fails, I'll be sure to throw its working partner straight into the garbage can. I certainly wouldn't use it to restore my entire filesystem that would have otherwise been obliterated.
I don't know about you, but I'm constantly deleting files by accident, and getting personal data destroying viruses (via a time machine from the 90s) where as my drives never, ever fail.
Well i'd say it depends on WHAT data is being backed up via RAID 1. For example if its something that can be replaced but would be a PITA, like say media files? Then as long as the odds of them doing something really stupid are low then i'd say the risks are low.
The big thing I've found is it is VERY important to have offline discs images of the OS because that is the area one will have to worry about malware, bad patches, etc and that will not be protected in any way with RAID since whatever went wrong with the first will be simply copied before you know what is happening. for my customers i recommend a USB HDD for OS images and any important files because 1.-it is easy to take offsite and replace with another. 2.-It is cheap enough that having more than one isn't cost prohibitive, and 3.-if one has more than one and rotate them even if a bug were to somehow get in and infect both the system and the USB drive attached it would still leave them the offsite backup to restore from.
But as long as one has offline backups as well for critical files then i see no harm in having RAID 1 as simply another layer of defense. Of course i would recommend something like HDDTune to check the SMART to keep an eye on the drives since a good SMART tool will often let you know long before it is noticeable that there is something wrong with a drive. i personally like to install Kel's CPL Bonus Pack on a system as it gives me all the tools I could need right from the control panel, like HDDTune, CPU and GPU-Z,HW monitor, etc. oh a bit of advice, if one wishes to use kel's CPL Bonus in Vista or 7 remember to run as admin when installing.
So while I wouldn't recommend RAID 1 as any kind of backup strategy by itself i see no problem in using it as part of a defense in depth strategy along with offline and offsite backups.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are you out of memory or something? because i have 8gb on my netbook and desktop and neither hardly hits the HDD at all unless i'm actually launching a program or searching for files and both are NTFS (Win 7 HP X64) so I just don't see where you are getting that. Looking down at the HDD indicator for the little 1.8GHz Sempron I have in the shop running XP it isn't seeing much disk activity either unless I am launching something, and its XP Home with only 1.5Gb of RAM.
So all i can think of is maybe your system is RAM starved or you are running something in the tray that is constantly hitting the drive for some reason. I would look at the tray apps as the only time i've seen that type of constant activity in a non RAM starved machine it turned out the tray app for a drawing pad he rarely used kept writing to the disc. When i killed that it was right as rain, so you might want to look into that.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If anyone wants an example of why RAID should always have a backup solution and not just and/or solution. Please check http://dslreports.com/ , as they just recovered from a powerloss at nac.net which took their entire array system with it, and fudged 2 years worth of data, which had to be sent off for recovery. That was on April16th, the site is just starting to come back up in the last two days.
Some info here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kll86bDn_MgWoo6Ja7oHo_yvI0SCqggEvNWwPWIcrHY/edit?pli=1
Om, nomnomnom...
Google released a study that showed SMART to be almost useless.
It wasn't a big surprise to me, as among the hundreds of drive failures I've dealt with in my 13 years experience supporting desktops and laptops, a SMART alert was involved only once or twice.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
RAM is cheap. Why not use it?
That kind of thinking is why whenever you buy a computer or even an Android phone, you have a ton of things loaded in memory at startup that you don't even like, let alone actually use. It's also why Pac-Man on an iPod is a 50-megabyte app when the game used to fit in like 3k of ram.
Unless Im mistaken, there is no "primary" in RAID 1, nor does one drive "mirror to the other". Data writes sent to the controller are mirrored to both drives simultaneously. If for some reason on-disk data gets corrupted, that will not be "mirrored over" to the other in any scenario I can think of. If you got a bad sector on one disk for example, any errors induced by it would not appear on the second drive (how the array would behave in that scenario I dont know, but it likely depends on the raid controller).
Because there is basically no point to it. The point of indexing is that rotational media has substantial access time penalties for fetching various info from random locations on the drive. By indexing it, you place all that metadata in one place so you can get a sequential read.
But with an SSD, there is not a substantial difference between random and sequential reads, and no significant penalty, so the indexing is not terribly useful. Additionally, indexing means more writes as well as increased background reads, which not only impacts performance (for little gain) but also wears out the drive.
Ditto for defragmenting; in fact defragging and indexing attack the same core problem, but from different angles, which is why neither is necessary on an SSD.
This "logging" you speak of is a feature of basically every modern filesystem used by basically any OS you might stick on a computer. HFS+, ext3+, btrfs, NTFS, all of them journal, and hence are slightly slower and slightly more active than non-journaling filesystems.
But most people with a clue recognize that those slight disadvantages are more than made up for by having a FS that remains consistent even after an unclean shutdown from ie a power outage.
As for the amount of activity you talk about, you are grossly overstating it. Open up resource monitor and you can watch how active your drive is. I promise you, except for the occasional recovery checkpoint (daily or less frequent), the OS is generally not to blame for any excess IO activity you see.
You are essentially saying "yeah, if you don't write very much to it, the SSD will not wear out", which is exactly the obvious corollary to what I pointed out. It just is not so that the user doesn't have to worry about wearing out his SSD. It's a failure mode that has to be considered. You can't just wave it away.
1) You can write an HDD CONTINUOUSLY for its entire expected mechanical and electronic lifetime without ANY wearout due to the writing - it essentially has an infinite design number of cycles with respect to writing. It is, inherently by design, free from wearout due to this particular cause. The SSD is emphatically not so.
2) "Unnecessary" features are not the only source of write data. A lot of us like to, you know, WRITE DATA to a drive because that is its PURPOSE. Some of us have the need to write more data than others.
Task manager can be tweaked to display the disk writes (I/O) of individual processes.
Processes --> View --> Select Columns
You can do something similar with Process Explorer,
which was an awesome program that got bought by Microsoft,
but has avoided the meddling that usually follows being aquired.
Process Explorer will show you the programs attached to processes like svchost.exe
so you can pinpoint exactly what's kicking up problems.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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
I have had a legal secretary delete about 10,000 files at the click of a mouse. Sometimes, backups are very handy things.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Even so, RAID 1 is not a valid backup strategy because of things like trojans/virus, user accidentally deleting files, software-induced database corruption, etc.
Linux uses free memory for additional buffers, but drops them immediately if that memory is needed for anything else. This memory is counted as "used" even though it's available for allocation. The ideal system designed on this principle would never show any free memory once the total amount of data read from storage exceeds the physical RAM size.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
there is no "even though"... almost all used memory is available for use. only difference is some allocated memory is never sent to swap..
There is a fundamental difference between a throwavay buffer and everything else -- buffer can be re-used at any time except while I/O on it is in progress.
ofcource.. first you need to deal with the broken unix design of overcomiting mem in the first place.
Overcommitting is neither Unix-originated, nor mandatory in Linux.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If the filesystem is already marked as clean, then e2fsck doesn't actually check anything. You might want to try timing "fsck -f ..."