Dirty NTFS Volume

My C drive keeps on reading as dirty and schedules chkdsk to run on startup. I can get this to stop by running startup repair before the computer boots and chkdsk runs successfully (normally it hangs) There are never any errors on the disk in the result. After this, and without shutting down, the dirty bit gets set again usually within hours.

Is my hard drive on its way to the big SATA port in the sky?
Is there any way my anti-virus might be causing this? (stab in the dark)

Boot Execute Registry Key= autocheck autochk *

Any ideas?

Probably the hard drive , and it would be worth running diagnostic test software from the drive manufacturers site.

However I have seen software trigger the 'chkdsk' at boot. Rare but I have seen it so if the drive checks out fine, look to recent installed apps that could be causing this.

THanks for your help. I ran thos diags and everything came back clean so I did some more digging into the event logs to see when this happened.

I think I had a chipset driver problem. HP just released some new drivers that appear to have cleared this error.

SDB15 said:

My C drive keeps on reading as dirty and schedules chkdsk to run on startup. I can get this to stop by running startup repair before the computer boots and chkdsk runs successfully (normally it hangs) There are never any errors on the disk in the result. After this, and without shutting down, the dirty bit gets set again usually within hours.

Technically, the "dirty bit" (I love that name) is always set while the box is running. It's only cleared during a successful and "graceful" shutdown. That's how the OS knows it needs to run CHKDSK should there be a system crash or power failure or something of the sort - the bit never gets cleared on shutdown.

SDB15 said:

Is my hard drive on its way to the big SATA port in the sky?

Impossible to tell without more investigation. Perhaps.

SDB15 said:

Is there any way my anti-virus might be causing this? (stab in the dark)

Yes, absolutely. If you can readily reproduce the symptom, that's actually quite a good thing. Try to uninstall the AV (disabling it is not enough) and see whether that makes any difference at all.

SDB15 said:

Any ideas?

Other than the AV, try testing whether the same issue occurs when booting into safe mode. If not, that opens up a whole bunch of additional troubleshooting options.

Also do a full CHKDSK /R if you haven't already tried that. It may detect surface issues with the drive platters.

Yeah the error came back even with the new drivers. I'll try the safe mode idea. I can only clear this error when I let the "repair your computer" run boot diagnostics. There are never any bad sectors after running chkdsk but I'll try running it with the settings you gave me. Thanks.

I think I've isolated the problem. The autosave function in word is causing this to happen. Has anyone else experienced this problem? I can reproduce the error every time word autosaves.

SDB15 said:

I think I've isolated the problem. The autosave function in word is causing this to happen. Has anyone else experienced this problem? I can reproduce the error every time word autosaves.

Word is just an app. It doesn't have file system filter drivers, nor the architectural understanding of what it means for an NTFS volume to be "dirty".

I don't doubt your finding that the Word autosave is somehow the trigger, but that just makes it even more likely that something with an "inspection" ability (inspecting what is just being saved by Word) is the culprit. Try temporarily uninstalling your AV and testing without it.

The true culprit is a kernel-mode driver, the BIOS, or the hardware. Apps simply cannot do this without the involvement of a component from the layer underneath.

Check and ensure you have Smartdisk enabled in your BIOS, otherwise any bad sectors will not be marked bad and will perpetually cause you problems like you describe.

Also, swap your SATA cable for a new one. I've known them to play up and cause frequent read/write errors.

If neither of these steps solve the problem then consider running Spinrite on the drive, checking your drive controller isn't defective (can you run it on another SATA header or test it in another computer?) and that you're using the correct chipset drivers.

Having the same issue with dirty bits here on an XPS 410 with Win 7 x32 Home Premium. Bios doesn't have SmartDisk option. Hard drive diagnostics find no error.

Has anyone found a solution for this issue?

Hi, I do not know about "dirty bits" but NOW AS I WRITE, I'm on my final phase of the restoration campaign of my HDD stuff, since - lo' and behold! - I'm having the same problem here as the thread starter. (I started in early Saturday, so you can imagine what mess I've been through with those huge HDDs which take several hours to scan...)

To cut it short, yes it was a HDD sector error, but how could I find it? Chkdsk found nothing, but chkdsk is crap, isn't it?

Well, I was lucky to accidentally (!) spot the surface test option in Partition Table Doctor (one of the best recovery tools [and thus life-savers] ever made IMHO!)

PTDD - which luckily does NOT care about SmartDisk! - indeed did find some errors, and with a little bit of Maths I was able to isolate the erroneous part (gladly not much!) and I'm now a whopping ;-) 225 MB short of my HDD. But better than CRC errors when accessing data later, huh?

I should also mention that I had FULL LOCKUPS in Win7 before, which are now gone as the bad sector area is completely masked out so that Windows doesn't know about it.