Vista SP1 CHKDSK disaster

1:41 AM Abdulla Nabeel 0 Comments

Last night I had one of those bone-chilling experiences - my Vista failed to boot. And it would not recover. No Safe-Mode, nothing.... nada.

This occured after I told DiskKeeper 2008 to do a Boot-Time defrag of my notebook's hard disk, and to afterwards run a good old "chkdsk". Doesn't sound harmful, does it?

The boot-time defrag worked perfectly, but when chkdsk ran, it started to pick up errors, and it tried to fix them. More specifically, it came up with the error: "Replacing invalid security id with default security id for file xxxxx" and fixed this for over 200 000 files (all the files on my hard disk). When the notebook rebooted, Vista simply failed to boot.

After firing up my old notebook (so that I could connect to the Internet and start  researching the problem) and asking the Google-Genie about my problem, it became apparent that this is a well known problem in the world, but that Microsoft is essentially turning a blind eye to it. This issue has been known since Vista SP1 came out, and have been occurring many times - but there is still no formal response from Microsoft. Nothing on TechNet, or any official Microsoft forum.

Some non-Microsoft forums had some recommendations - none of them nice, as they all revolved around restoring the system from a "System Backup" (something I'm going to do from now on), and re-installing everything.

So that's what I did.

First I booted from my Vista DVD, which allowed me a command console and access to my hard disk. This allowed me to copy my most precious files to a USB hard disk.

After this, I formatted the partition, and reinstalled everything. (I'm still busy - it takes forever to get my machine set up with all the developer tools I need)

I suppose I gain a "nice clean machine" from the experience, and I did not lose any data (that I know of), but I wasted a good 10 hours on installing software.

Conclusions:

1. NEVER run CHKDSK on Vista SP1.
2. Always have a "System Backup", made by Vista's Backup Tools, on an external Hard Disk. (From this I could have restored my system in an hour - Boot from DVD, Restore)