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".

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

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.

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.