calculating how long chkdsk /f will take

[gmail2]

Hi All

We have a 2003 R2 SP2 server which is our mail file server. All shares are in DFS to another server, however, the other server ran out of space recently so we disabled replication. The server has 2 RAID 5 volumes. One of the volumes has 2 partitions.

A few days ago, twice a day we get an error saying that the file structure on one of the disks is corrupt and unstable - and references ONE of the partitions. All the disks and controllers appear to be healthy (not run any indept diagnostics however) according to HP SMH

the events are logged twice a day, at the same time that our volume shadow copies are scheduled to run. However, the shadow copies are still taken at the scheduled times and we are able to restore files from those shadows

I have a few questions:
1. It seems a little coincidental that these errors are only being reported during VSS writes. Could this indicate that there is something wrong with VSS rather than the partition itself, ad if so, how can I confirm ?

2. If I am to run chkdsk /f on that partition, is there any way to calculate how long it will take ? The partiion is 600 GB with 373 GB of data and a further 67 GB in the shadow copies. It has 87,000 objects (files and folders) on the partition (not including VSS objects). Is there any way to calculate how long chkdsk /f would run for ?

3. I don't like working on live systems normally, but is it safe to run chkdsk in read only mode on a live system ?

Thanks in advance for any help anybody can provide



Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[itsp1965]

First of all it could be a VSS related issue. Could be VSS itself is corrupted. What errors do you see in the event log

As for CHKDSK, it will only run during your next reboot and not while your system is active. As for the time it'll take..... it depends on the following;

1. How much corruption is on the disk

2. The available space on your partition for manipulating clusters

3. The number of files in the partition it has to check

So suffice to say.. it'll take awhile

 

[gmail2]

Thanks for the reply itsp1965 ... yea, it's back to the old "it depends" answer isn't it I suspected there wasn't any clear cut answer, but I thought I'd ask just incase.

Regarding actually running chkdsk, I don't think it would have to be done at bootup - it's not the boot partition so it could just be run using /x switch which would dismount the partition, as far as I know

As for the errors, we're only getting event ID 55 (which is the message I put in my original post). I also suspect that maybe VSS is corrupt but I don't know if any way to test it other than restoring a file from it. I guess I could delete all the previous shadows and start again, but I'd rather not loose our shadows if possible. Do you know of any way to backup/restore the shadows ? I've tried googling it but it's not easy googline backup vss and getting the results you want

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau

 

[itsp1965]

Have you tried eventid.net

http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=55&eventno=1210&source=Ntfs&phase=1

 

[gmail2]

Sorry for not coming back to this. I ran chkdsk about 2 weeks ago on a Saturday ... took about 6 hours :-( It said it found and fixed some errors. But running it again in read-only mode still reported problems. To be honest, any machine I've ever run chkdsk on I've had the same result !

Anyway, running chkdsk didn't fix the problem, we still had the warnings when a shadow copy was being taken. So I decided to delete all shadow copies, and the errors went away. So, we presumed that one of the shadow copies was corrupt and causing these issues

Then, about 4 days afterwards, the errors came back again. So we've got them again now. This is really odd because it's limited to when VSS runs, and it's only on one partition even though there are other partitions on that volume which are fine.

The next thing we're going to try is disabling and re-enabling VSS on that partition. But after that I'm all out ideas, short of re-creating the partition completely.

If anybody has any ideas at all, or has experienced similar problems, I'd love to get some feedback

Irish Poetry - Karen O'Connor
Irish Poetry and Short Stories - Doghouse Books
Garten und Landschaftsbau