Friends Don’t Let Friends Run CHKDSK On SSDs

Source: The Register Friends Don’t Let Friends Run CHKDSK On SSDs

Yes They Fixed The CHKDSK Bug, But Don’t Do It!

There are more than a few people who discovered the hard way that CHKDSK is not a good thing to SSDs the hard way, thanks to a recent Microsoft Update which rendered SSDs unbootable if CHKDSK /F was run.  The issue, caused by KB4586853 and KB4592438 has been resolved and you will no longer destroy the NTFS file system on your SATA SSD  … but you still should not do it!

The research which was done on the bug, which The Register covers here, shows that the bug is not specifically CHKDSK but what the /f parameter calls, which causes a corrupted file 9 and an error in the BITMAP attribute of the Master File Table.  In theory you may be able to repair the damage by running the command again in offline mode, but it should be the last time you do so.

If you do find yourself with an SSD with a bad file system your best choice is to visit the manufacturer’s site and grab their proprietary tools which will help you get your disk back without the damage CHKDSK can do.  If you can’t or don’t want to, consider tools from diskpart or diskinternals which can also offer a variety of options which won’t cause excess wear and tear or straight out render the disk unusable.

Also, drop the defragmenter and step away from it for the love of all that is good!

A Windows 10 update rolled out by Microsoft contained a buggy version of chkdsk that damaged the file system on some PCs and made Windows fail to boot.

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Jeremy Hellstrom

Call it K7M.com, AMDMB.com, or PC Perspective, Jeremy has been hanging out and then working with the gang here for years. Apart from the front page you might find him on the BOINC Forums or possibly the Fraggin' Frogs if he has the time.

13 Comments

  1. Robin

    What’s the harm in running chkdsk on a ssd?

    Reply
    • Jeremy Hellstrom

      It’s not really designed for SSDs, they check for bad flash cells as part of their basic function. Doing it recently rendered the OS unbootable as an extra prize.

      Reply
      • omnichad

        Maybe before writing an entire article, look up the parameters and what they do. It’s /r that does a surface scan and leads to excess wear. The /f parameter only deals with NTFS filesystem problems and solid state drives are no more immune to filesystem problems than slimming disks. The bug is bad and that’s all.

        Reply
  2. Gobo

    You can run it, just don’t try to fix anything with the /F switch while bugs are still being squashed…
    SSDs rarely (if ever) need to be tampered with…

    Reply
  3. Will Irvin

    Hahahaha, love the title and good advice to boot…no pun intended

    Reply
  4. Secured2k

    The article and previous comments are not correct. In normal usage there is nothing wrong with using ChkDsk. The command is used to correct file system errors that could happen if the disk was not uncounted properly (system crash or unexpected power outage). There is a chance data corruption or loss could be caused by faulty hardware, but most storage these days are good at hiding this from the OS and transparently fixing things in the background (spare sector/nand relocation).
    The recent problem is a bug introduced by an update that probably added or changed a repair feature. This probably an improper use of a trim command which may have deleted/corrupted a required file system database file. Fortunately NTFS is very resilient and contains backup MFT files and transactional data.
    Third party tools and manufacturers tools either use the same interface to the file system (File system drivers like NTFS.SYS) or do not repair the file system at all – looking at just the hardware. ChkDsk does not check for bad sectors by default; the system has to log a file system read error before the system is flagged to do that in an offline mode. Checking for bad sectors is not a problem either as it is just a read verify operation.

    Reply
    • Jeremy Zimmerman

      100% this comment. Never tell anyone not to do something that will fix their system unless there a bug in said tool which was mentioned and should be patched. Honestly you shouldn’t need to run in by itself as mentioned if windows detects an issue it will tell you and ask to repair it on next reboot.

      Reply
      • Ta

        You absolutely should run chkdsk against NTFS filesystems regardless of medium.

        Reply
    • James Benjamin Truax

      Thank you! Also , SSDs have estimated TBW usually up in the100 or several 100s.
      Dskchk is a read function first & if it repairs… The west is a few kb or mb usually … & How is that “wearing down” 100-200 TBW

      Reply
  5. adrian84481

    “Also, drop the defragmenter and step away from it for the love of all that is good!”

    If you’re referring to the Windows builtin defragmenter, DON’T drop it. All it does is a periodic re-trim of each file system on SSDs. And I suspect most other current defrag tools do the same nowadays. How is that wrong?

    As for your opinion on chkdsk, you’re half there. Don’t run it manually, but don’t prevent it either. Windows will run it itself when it needs it. I can’t even remember when I saw chkdsk run at boot time in Windows 10. “if it works, don’t stuff around with it”

    Reply
  6. John Gittings

    I run 2 ssd and recently had the very problem described in this article, after an update then used all the traditional methods described here to resolve. I could not get away from the problem no master what I tried. I even ordered a new SSD with Windows preinstalled. During that time I decided to take out the SSD’S put them back in one at a time. I had to uninstall a hard drive as well. I did this one at a time trying to fix boot file. Now until I I got to one SSD(250gb) and did a clean install did I get things running. To this point the article is a good article and one I wish I had seen. The naysayers should watch what they say and catalog in their mind the jist of the article.

    Reply
    • Pcguy

      First of all the naysayers are correct.

      Second, you didn’t need to order a second SSD or any of what you did really. You could have just ran it again using Windows recovery or using a Windows install USB that you could have created yourself.

      So you wasted your money and time and wiped out your system for nothing.

      Reply
  7. Fathima Razak

    Can I get compensation from Microsoft as a Windows update was done then it was reversed and my computer will not start even with an installation disk to boot with.

    Reply

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