Comments on: NTFS file system glitch

By: KiP

KiP — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:48:18 +0000

Try running chkdsk from a command prompt using the following:

chkdsk c: /i

the /i command doesn’t check the indexes and time stamps in quite the same way, although the folder and data integrity is checked and I believe it is the time stamps or some part of that which usually causes false positives when running chkdsk from within windows. The problem was fixed (so I believe) for Windows Server 2003 with SP1 but the fix does not appear to have been passed on to XP. The 2003 resource kit has an app called vrfydsk.exe – not sure if it works under XP.

To get a proper result for XP you should really boot to the Recovery Console (boot from the XP CD and pretend you’re going do an install) from there run chkdsk c: or if you want a more thorough (lengthy) check add /f or /r to the end.

If you don’t have a CD (maybe you have OEM pc) you can add recovery console to the boot menu: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654 – if you have an oem build you should be able to find the i386 folder in the Windows directory or on your recovery partition (contact vendor / manufacturer).

Annoyingly I cannot find the article the discusses this error… if I do I will post it here.

Cheers Chris

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:29:49 +0000

Thanks for your info.

By: mwjqx@hotmail.com

mwjqx@hotmail.com — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:21:33 +0000

epwvyxa pgank

By: Comage

Comage — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:05:49 +0000

Thanks for maintaining this thread here. This problem is still around even until now, with all the service packs and patches released.

By: moss

moss — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 15:36:31 +0000

But I find it can’t be ignored,because my space is diminished when it happened, and I want to get my lost space back. Can you find some resolution to deal with it.In a word,I don’t want to ignore .

By: Bicycle Bob

Bicycle Bob — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 22:14:26 +0000

Don’t close this thread!!! I have a new system (Asus A8N SLI Prem mb, 2 Seagate 320 drives, XP Pro SP2, NTFS) and didn’t even get all my programs on before getting “CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap” error and prompting to run Chkdsk /f which of course has to be run at next boot as the error occurs on the OS volume. I ran it and the error disappeared, but then came back soon after…very inconsistant. I wasted a bunch of time before formatting and starting over. This time I disabled Indexing on all my drives right after I got Windoze running. And guess what…after a couple days of reinstalling, problem came back! So I bought another drive (!) and started again! And…you guessed it! I wish I’d read this forum first!!! Anyway, I believe it is indeed related to disk write caching. I now tend to agree with those who say it isn’t a serious problem (no apparent problems with my system) (as long as system seems to run well otherwise, and defrag works, and free space and used space seem to add up to total drive size on all drives) But I’ve lost a week of time. And I’m disappointed Microsoft doesn’t even honestly address this issue on their website–even if they just clearly admitted it as a common “bug” or glitch, I might have saved a lot of time and some $$ (though I like having the 2nd drive to put all my data on, completely on it’s own disk, as far from the Windoze operating system as possible!

By: oldephard

oldephard — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 20:43:52 +0000

I gave up and just started using Linux. (Ubuntu / CentOS)

By: Lawrie

Lawrie — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 23:27:16 +0000

I converted my windows xp professional drive from FAT32 to NTFS and restart the computer but it hangs up before windows start. I don’t know what to do. Any help?

By: Steve

Steve — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 21:53:31 +0000

I have been getting scandisk at startup every since I un-installed AVG Anti-Virus FREE Version. I did have (1) Virus in the Vault at the time of uninstall. I was promped to delete or ??? (store??) at the time. I choose delete. I believe that this is the reason for the constant report of (developed bad sectors) at start-up. However when I run Scandisk it reports no error’s found. Is it possible that AVG Anti-Virus has security marked a part of my hard drive and therefore reporting them as bad sectors at startup?

By: Rogger K

Rogger K — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 19:47:32 +0000

I am having the exact problem on an external hard drive (Toshiba 80 GB) of the system which has Windows NT 4.0 (Service Pack 6a) running on it. There is a single application which writes and deletes files to the external drive. After weeks of verification, the application does nothing wrong but when the application is writing and I run chkdsk it gives me the MFT or Bitmap errors. When I stop the application, I see no error messages. My Problem is: this external drive boots up the system and on an improper shutdown the system does not reboot. I used DFSee to analyze the hard disk and see the same MFT and Bitmap errors. So I am convinced that this temporary inconsistent state which NTFS goes into when writing/deleting files if not handled properly (not terminating gracefully on shutdown) will definitely cause the system not to reboot. Because NTLDR checks the file system sanity before booting up and when it finds this inconsistent state, it is unable to boot up the system. And since this is NT 4.0 I do not even have an option to disable disk cache! Any ideas?