Run chkdsk or move files to new storage

[Medyo]

I have a 55TB drive that I am currently running chkdsk on. So far it's been running for more than 3 days and is only 34% complete. I cannot wait any longer but Windows says that the drive is dirty so I have to solve that problem.

I have the luxury of being able to add an additional 55TB storage on the machine. As far as the purpose of chkdsk is concerned, if I add a new drive on the operating system, move all the data into that new drive, and then just get rid of the old drive does that somehow solve my chkdsk problems/"dirty disk" issue? My understanding is chkdsk solely check for file system errors and not files/data. If that is incorrect and chkdsk checks the individual files then moving it to another drive doesn't really solve my issue because those files will still be dirty or corrupted.

 

[USAFRet]

"55TB" ?

Yes, chkdsk is going to take a LONG time.

Assuming the files are not actually corrupted, moving them over to a new drive (55TB?) will probably not move any 'weirdness'.
However...this will also take a lot of time. 55TB is a significant amount of data.

Care to give us a little background on this system?
That is a lot of data, and needs to be handled carefully.

(and I sincerely hope you have a working, tested, backup plan in place)

 

[Medyo]

"55TB" ?

Yes, chkdsk is going to take a LONG time.

Assuming the files are not actually corrupted, moving them over to a new drive (55TB?) will probably not move any 'weirdness'.
However...this will also take a lot of time. 55TB is a significant amount of data.

Care to give us a little background on this system?
That is a lot of data, and needs to be handled carefully.

(and I sincerely hope you have a working, tested, backup plan in place)

Yes, 55TB. It is actually a Nimble provisioned storage attached on a Windows 2012 Server. I didn't want to do the chkdsk on the server to avoid impacting production so I cloned the entire server with the 55TB drive through Nimble's cloning feature to mimic it completely and then run chkdsk on that. I was going to test and see first how long it will take before doing it on the actual server, but because it has been running for three days now then chkdsk is totally out of the equation. The actual data that resides on the drive is only 38TB, but still, that is large.

So far everything I read about chkdsk talks about sectors, drive, spindles, file system, etc but nothing about checking and repairing individual files so I figured maybe it's best to xcopy those data over to a new drive instead. I can even run chkdsk on the newly provisioned drive before copying data into it just to ensure it is clean to begin with.

 

[Sam Poland]

I suggest, in the strongest possible terms, you contact the manufacturer/vendor for technical support.