NTFS file system corruption

total1 · 12th August 2007

Win2K3 SP2
Exchange Server 2003 SP2
Drive C: & Drive E: @ 40GB/200GB respectively (drive images on RAID-1 config)
250GB RAID-1 drives

Issue: Corrupt NTFS on Drive E:

CHKDSK, from the Win2K3 Recovery Console, is showing 75% complete on Drive E:. However, it appears to be 'staying' in the same place on the drive even though I've heard HD sounds every 1-5 minutes or so. Today, I did a search and found this link at Microsoft on CHKDSK: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931689
It indicates an issue with CHKDSK if there's a compressed (zip'd?) file >4GB. We've been running CHKDSK for 7+ days @ 75% (no % movement, but HD seems to be 'more active' now). NTFS system is corrupt on Drive E:. We're running CHKDSK in Recovery Console Mode and hence the SBS server has been down all week.

1) What should I do? [How can I apply the temporary fix since the SBS server won't boot up! - we had a catalog indexing problem which hung the server forcing a reboot. Under Recover Console, Drive E: becomes Drive H: and so doing a "dir H: yields a message something similar to "Not a valid file structure" (can't remember exact message at this time). Doing the Chkdsk h: /f goes to 75% almost immediately.]

2) If CHKDSK can't solve the issue, do I just blow away partition (Drive E

? Since I have backup (by directory and zip'd) replacing these back to Drive E: would still put the NTFS corruption back to Drive E:. So what's my approach here?

3) Non-MS solutions?

4) It appears that Drive C where Exchange is located is fine.

5) Also have SQL 2000 DBs on a different (external drive) but SQL is installed on drive C:

6) FTP server (inetput/ftproot) is on Drive E, FWIW. What's the effect of blowing away Drive E and re-establishing these two (2) directories?

7) What would CAUSE this NTFS file corruption issue?

TIA!!!

**Bursley** · 13th August 2007

If you have a backup of Drive E, I would recommend formatting and restoring the data. It sounds to me like the file system is beyond the basic repair features of chkdsk. If you really need the data back, your OEM or Microsoft may be able to assist, but there would probably been an incident charge for this type of assistance.
If the data is valuable, and your OEM or Microsoft are not able to help, Drive Savers or OnTrack works wonders.

total1 · 13th August 2007

Bursley, I have backups of the directories but not of the entire partition. We keep Zip'd b/ups of the various 'necessary' directories each night on a different disk - Monday, Tuesday ... Friday in different folders. This keeps our limited resources in control instead of having a bunch of tapes floating around on a drive that just has 'good' and 'transient' directories.
The concern on the backups are that the NTFS catalog index corruption will reside on these backups also. While we were obtaining backups of the various directories before the server actually went down, each time we copied a 'corrupted' directory the destination partition also become corrupted.
So, the backups we have are, to our knowledge, also corrupted. Especially, with a couple of 'good/necessary' directories (documents etc.)
We have some HD utilities that could extract the directories and files as needed I think. We've used them to recover totally lost NTSF files etc. (Don't remember the names at this time, though).
Is there are "PowerChkDsk utility" in existence? Or, do we have to recover our files one-by-one if the directory structure is toast?
Have you had experience with Chkdsk not completing? What did you do then?
What would have caused the NTFS system to become corrupted? Any ideas?
TIA,

tiwang · 15th August 2007

hi - i would suggest that you mount f.ex a usb hd on the server and copy everything possibly from your suspect drive to that and format that drive so that you can go on with your businiess. If you don't dare to copy the contents then do the opposite - remove the drive (if it isn't part of f.ex a RAID) and insert a new disc and come further - get the box alive again so that you can work with it and use some better tools than those offered from the recovery console - the recovery console is usefull to recover a crashed server but there might be better tools to recover a corrupt disc - or files from it.
best regards /ti