Computer News: Tech Mania

Tech Mania

Windows 7 RTM has a chkdsk bug/showstopper

Posted: 05 Aug 2009 06:47 PM PDT

Today is August 6th when RTM will be out on MSDN/Technet but it contains a bug in the chkdsk command.How and what ?When ya run “CHKDSK [drive letter:] /r” without the quotes in command prompt and take a look at the memory consumption in the processes tab you find that chkdsk.exe reaches either at or around 90% or it maxes completely out and gives a freeze or a BSOD.Below is a screenie what i meant.

Some say its really not a bug but far from being a showstopper and Randall Kennedy says that it could hamper Windows 7 launch.Windows VP Steven Sinofsky post in Chris blog based on FireRx comment states that this is a controller issue and can be fixed with updated drivers, which could be done via Windows update soon.Here is a excerpt from unconfirmed comment by Sinofsky.

In this case, we haven't reproduced the crash and we're not seeing any crashes with chkdsk on the stack reported in any measurable number that we could find. We had one beta report on the memory usage, but that was resolved by design since we actually did design it to use more memory. But the design was to use more memory on purpose to speed things up, but never unbounded — we request the available memory and operate within that leaving at least 50M of physical memory.

We appreciate the kind words that such a bug as above is "out of place" with Windows 7–we're working hard. We are certainly going to continue to look for, monitor, and address issues as they arise if required. So far this is not one of those issues.We just kicked off overnight stress testing of 40 machines of variants as reported by FireRx.

It’s a fault on the memory management side.Lets see if we get a patch via the Windows Update soon.

Via