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.'"

Comments

Re:No more hours of downtime

[OzPeter]

sane precautions with your data such as RAID and/or backing up your information

RAID and backing up should never be considered an "OR".
 
Repeat after me .. "RAID is not a backup strategy".

Re:New options?

[The MAZZTer]

"Online" as in "don't dismount the disk while we fix it, so you can continue to use it".

source leaked!!!

[marcello_dl]

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

Marketing dept.

[Citizen of Earth]

phases that include 'Detect Corruption,'

Given the other phase names, I surprised the marketing department didn't call this "Detect Awesomeness!".

Next Gen File system

[OzPeter]

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

Re:Next Gen File system

[OzPeter]

In fact the whole blog is interesting Building Windows 8

Re:No more hours of downtime

[Anonymous Coward]

Right up until your primary gets some corruption and proceeds to mirror it to the other.

Re:No more hours of downtime

[jo_ham]

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.

Re:v8 chkdsk on windows 7?

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of what the team has been doing since Windows 7 is to refactor large monolithic DLLs (like kernel32 and advapi) into smaller DLLs that are layered more properly and quicker to load (due to reduced size). Windows 8 continues this work. This is part of the whole "minwin" effort that lots of people in the (external to MS) rumor mill got excited about a few years back. (At least minwin is what they used to call it. Core system is another term used later.)

As a result of this work, in Win7 and Win8, most binaries you find in system32 depend on newfangled DLLs not present in a downlevel system and will thus not load on an older version of the OS. So I doubt it. (Not to mention that this new thing in particular, since it's about modifying online filesystems, might depend on new ioctls or other hooks in ntfs.sys or maybe some other driver - though I can't say I know that for sure.)

-Former Windows dev.

Duel OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

En garde!!!

Re:No more hours of downtime

[Orphaze]

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.

#1 thing I want - block-level checksums

[PhunkySchtuff]

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.