Windows 10: MFT Corrupt.

Twice in the last month or so I've noticed my Macrium images have been failing due to MFT Corrupt error. Does anyone have any idea why the MFT would be corrupting?




:)

 

Corrupt MFT on Steam HDD

It's called a "Dirty Bit". There is software to remove the dirty bit, but it's not fullproof, and rather dangerous, because the dirty bit isn't meant to be removed other than by successfully running a chkdsk.

That's the preferred option. I had a similar issue when using Acronis last week. Turns out wiping things fresh and starting again is much much easier.

 

MFT corruption after update.

Right after the Anniversary Update, my MFT file got corrupted on my RAID 1. Both MFT's on both drives.

Now I have to try to recover what I lost on the drive and rebuild.

Do you even test this software?!?

 

Corrupt MFT on Steam HDD

So, a couple months ago I decided to get a larger HDD for my Steam games (I prefer to keep Steam separate from my other games, just to be tidy). I used the Acronis WD edition to clone the drive to the larger one, because I was lazy.

Since then, I've had 50% of my shutdowns result in the Win 8.1 "frown face" bluescreen with 0xc000021a. Basically didn't care too much, nor did I put two and two together until this weekend. I decided to track it down. Since I know the majority of those errors relate to the need for updated drivers, I decided to check all of them, with the only needing update being the LAN drivers. Got updates for those, but the issue persisted. Decided to see if I had a bad HDD (although SMART status for ALL drives is top-notch) and ran CHKDSK on all HDD. All were fine except the Steam drive.

On that one, CHKDSK reported it was aborting, because the MFT was corrupted. Knowing that there is a mirrir of the MFT also, I tried out program Test Disk, just to see if it could b repaired. What do you know, the mirror was also corrupted and the issue could not be resolved. I checked the Event Logs, and Windows was reporting on every sign on and logoff that that the Steam drive was corrupted (but not detailing it as MFT corruption). That by the way, is the only issue, so I suspect that is the cause of the shutdown bluescreens.

As a result of me running CHKDSK on a drive that had a corrupt MFT, I can no longer run defrag on that HDD, due to CHKDSK being scheduled. That now tries to run, but cannot on startup, due to the corruption of the MFT.

Funny thing is, I can play all my Steam games, and access each and every folder on hat drive in Windows Explorer, which normally you cannot do if the MFT is corrupt. So, decided to get a 1TB drive and just expand for the future, even though I don't believe that drive itself is bad. I think it is purely software-related, and probably is a result of me cloning that drive out of laziness.

EDIT: I did think about changing SATA cables, but because all games are there in their completeness, including games installed since then that is probably not likely the issue. The only real manifestation other than the logs, CHKDSK warning, and shutdown bluescreen, is that Steam client keeps trying to update the same date, which is the November 14th update. This is just about the time I cloned the drive, highly coincidentally.

After I do that I will attempt to re-format the current Steam HDD, and it should be as good as new, since there are no SMART problems reported, and WD Diagnostics also ran a full test and found no errors with the drive.

Any thoughts? Is my assessment of the situation correct?