While a proactive approach to maintaining disks and their file systems is important, it's also inevitable that disasters will occur and you'll need to react to them appropriately. Here are some tips to using one of the key maintenance tools for disk and file systems that is included with Windows Server 2003, namely Chkdsk.exe:
- Make sure you know you have a good recent backup before you run chkdsk.exe.
- Never interrupt Chkdsk.exe while it's doing its job.
- Make sure you have enough time during your maintenance downtime window to run Chkdsk.exe—on very large volumes this command can take a long time to finish its work. To speed up the operation of Chkdsk.exe on very large volumes, you can run it in a "light" form by specifying chkdsk drive_letter /f /c /i before you try running the slower chkdsk /r.
- Chkdsk.exe can't run on the boot/system volume when Windows is running, and it also can't run on data volumes when file handles are open on the volume. The reason being that in both of these situations Chkdsk.exe is unable to lock the volume for its exclusive use. In these cases, Chkdsk.exe will be scheduled to run at the next system restart.
- If you think your volume may be dirty but you don't want Autochk.exe to run when it reboots—for instance, if your server is heavily used and you can't afford the downtime while Autochk.exe runs—you can use the Chkntfs.exe command to first determine whether the volume is dirty or not, and second to find out whether Autochk.exe is currently schedule to run at the next restart. If you determine that the volume is dirty and Autochk.exe is scheduled to run at next restart, you can delay running Autochk.exe using the chkntfs /d command. Note however that doing this is risky—if your volume is dirty you should deal with it as soon as possible and not procrastinate.
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