[Update: Bug existed in Insider Builds since August] Chkdsk is supposedly corrupting SSDs on Windows 10

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, aDoomGuy said:

I've run it manually on all my drives on 20H2 and it caused me no problems. Must be a part of the troubleshooting feature or system specific.

 

 

Just to let everyone in on the secret.

 

Depending on what version of Windows you upgraded from, you may have an older SDD/SATA driver installed. So a fresh reinstall will have all validated drivers, and the problem is unlikely to show up. However if you update your OS before updating the drivers, you will run into lots of disk-related errors.

 

It's probably too early to speculate on why exactly this is happening, but I reasonably suspect that the reason is that users that experienced this, they were not running their system in the recommended (RAID, not AHCI for Intel) configuration, and thus CHKDSK probably sent an AHCI command instead of a NVME command to the drive. 

 

Another possibility is the entire UEFI/MBR thing, which seems unlikely as new computers are not shipped in MBR. 

 

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

Theoretically, but that requires that the OS be bootable and in a repairable state.

You can do offline repair, booting in to the OS is not necessary just easier if you still can.

 

4 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

DISM and SFC /SCANNNOW are dubious commands that often don't work

Ah what?!? I think what you actually mean is people don't know how to use them. DISM is also a tool made for something else and can be used to repair an OS but that's not actually it' purpose. I have successfully repaired Windows using both and combined with those depending on problem, usually it's .Net nuking itself.

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

With Windows, the line between the OS and your data is basically not existent. With macOS the operating system and your data are very distinct things. You can reinstall macOS and 100% of everything about your data will be in the same place as it was before. Not so with Windows. 

You mean also like with Windows if you don't format the disk and it renames the Windows folder to Windows.old etc and all your data is there too.....

[DrMacintosh]

Just now, leadeater said:

I have successfully repaired Windows using both and combined with those depending on problem, usually it's .Net nuking itself.

I've used both tools to great success also. I'm just disappointed with how often I need these tools and really disappointed when Windows is so damaged that these tools aren't effective and a reinstall will result in loss of data.  

[DrMacintosh]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

You mean also like with Windows if you don't format the disk and it renames the Windows folder to Windows.old etc and all your data is there too.....

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that if you attempt to reinstall windows using the "keep your files" option (which does not preserve any user preferences or application installs) that all your "personal files" get shoehorned into Local Disk C -> Windows.old? 

[leadeater]

5 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you saying that if you attempt to reinstall windows using the "keep your files" option (which does not preserve any user preferences or application installs) that all your "personal files" get shoehorned into Local Disk C -> Windows.old? 

No you said that Windows will not keep all your data, it will in fact do just that. All the data is there. Now if when you say data and include installed applications well that is a different thing, but the application data will actually still be there just not "installed" and listed in Add/Remove Programs. Not particularly useful but the data is still there at least.

 

When Windows installs and detects existing system folders like Windows and Users it renames these to .old and then continues with the OS install.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

I've used both tools to great success also. I'm just disappointed with how often I need these tools and really disappointed when Windows is so damaged that these tools aren't effective and a reinstall will result in loss of data.  

How often are you having to do this? Even including my work related interactions with Windows having to do this has been exceedingly rare. I did it once this year and maybe once 2 years ago, further back than that couldn't reliably remember but it'll be less than 10 times in 10 years across every Windows install I've ever interacted with.

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

Nope. There is a reason why YouTube, Google, this forum, and just about thing that stores data uses a database instead of a text file.

 

 

That's comparing rocks and pineapples.

 

A program's own settings, should be either within the application's directory (which is how Windows applications are organized already, unlike Linux which dumps everything into /usr/bin/local ), user-personalization should be within the user's directory (which is what "appdata" is in Windows.) The registry should not be used for trivial application-specific data. Like many games, the only registry data is simply the install/uninstall data. If you move the physical game to another drive, without uninstalling and reinstalling it, it will complain that it can't find the game, despite you running it, because for some reason it reads the registry for it's installed location. You know, rather than just do "getcwd" once at program launch and store it in memory. 

 

Some of the most asinine usage of the registry are Japanese games that check to see if they are on a Japanese Locale/Timezone before launching, store all their save games as blobs in the registry, and you can't even install/uninstall them without administrative access. Meanwhile, western games, have almost entirely taken the "user-personalization" directory to store their settings, yet you know what this means now?

 

If you have onedrive installed, onedrive gloms onto your desktop and documents directories. So games that are storing screenshots and video there? (I can name two immediately, and they don't let you change it) are now going to burn your internet bandwidth every time you do something inside the game that saves something in the documents directory.

 

The registry is a database, yes, but it's primary purpose is for maintaining OS-integration settings. So programs like Microsoft Office, and Adobe Creative Suite have a lot of OS-integration because they touch a lot of things inside the OS in order for the software to appear less stupid. There is no registry on the Mac, so where do you think Office and Creative Suite store their settings?

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/mac/deploy-preferences-for-office-for-mac

Quote

Preference files are stored in the app container, which isn't the same thing as the app bundle. The app container is created the first time an app is run. The app container is located in the user's ~/Library/Containers folder. For example, the app container for Excel is named com.microsoft.Excel. Within the app container, the .plist file is located in the Data/Library/Preferences folder. For example, the .plist file for Excel is named com.microsoft.Excel.plist.

 

The plist files, btw, are binary xml files. XML of course, being developed in 1996, predating MacOS X, and Windows 2000. Windows 2K, Vista, 7,8,10 are all still based on the NT design, and this was reflected in the Version number until 10 (with Vista, 7 and 8 being 6.x).

 

Essentially, all the evidence points towards using the registry for applications as being unnecessary, and even harmful to making them portable between users and other environments/computers. But there are places where it's more about convenience, for example application common dialog box settings (which can be set on a per folder basis), settings inside video codecs, that would otherwise need an INI file every time any video is played or encoded.

 

And just to touch one other comment.

 

No MacOS X is no easier or better in regard to file/disk structure. NTFS tends to put the data consecutively, which means you can run a tool to recover jpg's and such on the disk and it will find the entire file if the disk is regularly defragmented. On OSX, this is not the case, and each block is has a fixed amount of data in it, which means if you go scouring the hard drive for jpeg's anything bigger than that block size is just disappeared.

 

Ultimately the 'best', tongue-in-cheek filesystem was FAT if you ever want to recover data, as anything more complicated relies heavily on how the disk was maintained, and if you regularly "defrag" a SSD, TRIM runs and there is zero chance of recovering the deleted data. This is why FAT-related file systems are still used on removable media, because every OS can read it, and it's easier to repair on any OS that can read the media. exFAT, as of 2019 is the only file system that can be read and written to by everything. But exFAT is not a good file system for storing anything but photos/video on it. It has terrible performance for accessing small files, which, just like SSD's themselves, don't like dealing with small files while having large cluster sizes.

 

Anyway, this gets too deep into OS design choices, and suffice it to say the performance of Microsoft Windows suffers more due to the Registry use than one would think. Run any registry/file access tool and filter it to just the application or game you're using, you'll see thousands of requests to invalid registry keys for no apparent reason.

[rcmaehl]

Minor update. This issue was brought up to at least the MS Insider Twitter Team since August. See first post for details and twitter link.

[DrMacintosh]

38 minutes ago, leadeater said:

How often are you having to do this? Even including my work related interactions with Windows having to do this has been exceedingly rare.

Just about every time I service a machine, Windows has been corrupted severely. 

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Try editing any system files as a mundane user, im done talking.

you... really... just have to google it... 

 

I was easily able to take over "trusted installer" or what it's called (took some researching and "logical thinking" though) and it was such a relief, now windows does what I say and not some update orchestrator or waasmedic dude, nope, it's all just me (and the random BSODs stopped too, oddly enough. Windows 10 is actually pretty good if it doesn't constantly try to rewrite itself in a live environment - which it is actually really bad at though - lol) 

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.laptopmag.com/amp/articles/take-ownership-folder-windows-10-using-file-explorer

 

(I also had to do some policy editor shenanigans which partly only worked once I took over the trusted installer guy, I don't really recall this part fully, sadly...) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[StDragon]

4 hours ago, rcmaehl said:

Minor update. This issue was brought up to at least the MS Insider Twitter Team since August. See first post for details and twitter link.

Running an AMD R7-3800X with Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe drive. Version of Windows 10 is 20H2 with all updates applied.

 

I was able to run a chkdsk /f and chkdsk /r no problems 

 

Given this is can be repeated on a VM tells me it's probably some memory leak or specific CPU bug. Throwing a kernel panic (BSOD) on NTFS is bad mojo. Someone at Microsoft screwed up bigly!

[jagdtigger]

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

you... really... just have to google it... 

I said mundane user not administrator....... (Small shield icon confirms in tutorial, when you see that shield that means it needs elevated privileges......)

[Mark Kaine]

19 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

I said mundane user not administrator....

oh ok, I took that as average gamer with little to no knowledge about windows inner workings (such as myself) ... but yes, you sure as heck need admin privileges, even that isn't enough at some point (it asks about a password for trusted installer) <--- this is kinda muddy in my memory lol but I think once I identified and renamed a couple of non cooperative processes it let me take over "ownership"... 

 

But point taken! 

[jagdtigger]

9 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

, I took that as average gamer with little to no knowledge about windows inner workings (such as myself)

Oh okay, ill try to be more clear about it next time...

 

10 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

but yes, you sure as heck need admin privileges, even that isn't enough at some point

If i have to go that far i usually go medieval on its @ss and rape it with a live linux.....  It was a huge waste of time because even small updates tended to undo things i tweaked, so just jumped ship and now the only windows machine is my gaming PC, segregated onto the IOT network where it belongs.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, jagdtigger said:

It was a huge waste of time because even small updates tended to undo things i tweaked

but that was the point of my whole endeavor, I don't have any updates anymore (except Windows defender definitions) if I click on "update" category nothing happens, no window is opened, no error message,, simply nothing. 

 

And it really fixed the random BSODs I was getting, and also overall the pc runs a lot more smoothly and silent, since their is no "update orchestrator" orchestrating things in the background anymore... I don't know about the long term implications, but I have OCD and finally silence is very much worth the tradeoff to me 

(and I have backups...) 

[jagdtigger]

Just now, Mark Kaine said:

but that was the point of my whole endeavor, I don't have any up da anymore (except Windows defender definitions) if I click on "update" category nothing happens, no window is opened, no error message,, simply nothing. 

If i pay for something i expect that that thing will do what i instruct it to do, and not "talk back" like this junk does... At this point w10 is as good as the titanic, only question when it will sink.

[yian88]

well fml, i hate windows, my mom's computer has the worst issues blue screen black screen freeze and shit, same lenovo laptop as mine only difference is mine is ryzen 2200u her ryzen 3 3200u the rest is the same im sick of reinstalling and trying to fix that garbage

[GoodBytes]

1 minute ago, yian88 said:

well fml, i hate windows, my mom's computer has the worst issues blue screen black screen freeze and shit, same lenovo laptop as mine only difference is mine is ryzen 2200u her ryzen 3 3200u the rest is the same im sick of reinstalling and trying to fix that garbage

 

BSOD's are, most of the time, related to a hardware or driver issue. 

This is of course off topic, but I invite you to make a new thread with full details on the BSOD(s) you are getting so the community can help you identify the problem.

 

[GoodBytes]

News update:

• Microsoft confirmed the issue.
• Affects only a small group of people.
• Microsoft released a fix.
• Microsoft provides a fix for affected users.

 

Quote

This issue is resolved and should now be prevented automatically on non-managed devices. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours for the resolution to propagate to non-managed devices. Restarting your device might help the resolution apply to your device faster. For enterprise-managed devices that have installed this update and encountered this issue, it can be resolved by installing and configuring a special Group Policy. To find out more about using Group Policies, see Group Policy Overview.

 

To mitigate this issue on devices which have already encountered this issue and are unable to start up, use the following steps:

1. The device should automatically start up into the Recovery Console after failing to start up a few times.
2. Select Advanced options.
3. Select Command Prompt from the list of actions.
4. Once Command Prompt opens, type: chkdsk /f
5. Allow chkdsk to complete the scan, this can take a little while. Once it has completed, type: exit
6. The device should now start up as expected. If it restarts into Recovery Console, select Exit and continue to Windows 10.

 

Note After completing these steps, the device might automatically run chkdsk again on restart. It should start up as expected once it has completed.

 

 

Source: December 8, 2020—KB4592438 (OS Builds 19041.685 and 19042.685) (microsoft.com)

 

 

[TorC]

1 hour ago, yian88 said:

well fml, i hate windows, my mom's computer has the worst issues blue screen black screen freeze and shit, same lenovo laptop as mine only difference is mine is ryzen 2200u her ryzen 3 3200u the rest is the same im sick of reinstalling and trying to fix that garbage

Why not put Linux on your mom's machine, then?  Lenovo works well with most any distro -- try MX or elementary.

[jagdtigger]

4 hours ago, TorC said:

Lenovo works well with most any distro

Unless its one of the models where the storage controller is locked in a mode which the linux driver does not recognize.....

[TorC]

On 12/21/2020 at 8:39 PM, jagdtigger said:

Unless its one of the models where the storage controller is locked in a mode which the linux driver does not recognize.....

Yes, I agree.  I have not looked into Lenovo of late -- thanks for the caveat . 

Dell (Latitude, not Inspiron) is my preference.

[Mark Kaine]

On 12/20/2020 at 3:40 AM, rcmaehl said:

Users running the Windows 10 20H2 update have reported that the Chkdsk tool is corrupting SSDs.

sorry, just to be clear, 1809 is not affected by this? 

 

 

[StDragon]

6 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

sorry, just to be clear, 1809 is not affected by this? 

 

 

For Home and Pro versions, 1809 was EOLed Nov 10, 2020

 

The minimum version you should be on now is 1909, but that will EOL on May 11, 2021. Might as well go to 20H2

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-10-home-and-pro