how to do chkdsk in windows 7 without using more than 5GB RAM?

[tommo123]

doing it now and checked task manager - it's using 5,615,068 K

this is SP1. i hoped this bug would be fixed by now.

if i do this on a full disk, it gives me (eventually) warnings about running out of memory and to shut programs down.

it does it on 3 pcs

is there a fix for this, or at least a way to limit chkdsks RAM usage?

 

[corkyg]

CHKDSK i s normally done boot time at the command prompt. What difference does it make how much RAM it uses? The OS, SP1, etc. are not even loaded.

 

[tommo123]

it makes a lot of difference when you're doing it in windows. the other option is to leave the PC unusable for 12-18 hours as it scans a 2TB external drive

as for being in windows, it does make a difference it you cant (in time) run anything else as it tells you it's running out of memory and even forces you to shut down other things.

anyhoo. i found that if the drive is very full, ram usage is nuts and gives errors. if though, i leave a few hundred gigs free and then do it, it uses a ton of ram but doesn't give errors

still a bug though. no way can you call not being able to run a chkdsk on a full drive without essentially crashing the PC - a feature

 

[tcsenter]

Put the drive into another PC as a secondary drive (either internal or external), run chkdsk on it from there.

Or, remove drive, put a new/blank HDD in your system, install Windows on it and boot from it, then connect the drive to be scanned as a secondary drive (internal or external), run chkdsk on it.

 

[corkyg]

Why would it scan the 2TB external if you are running it on C:? You might want to read a tutorial on how to use CHKDSK.

Your drive may be too full for normal maintenance. Make sure you run CHKDSK as Administrator.

 

[tcsenter]

Running CHKDSK on non-system/boot volumes or disks (i.e. secondary drives) doesn't make the system unuseable. It uses some resources (including CPU) and makes things a little less responsive or laggy but hardly unuseable.

 

[corkyg]

BTW - the old rule is valid. In order for HDD services and maintenance to be propwerly performed, the drive should have at least 10% free space. On a 2 TB drive that is about 208 GB.

 

[tommo123]

Running CHKDSK on non-system/boot volumes or disks (i.e. secondary drives) doesn't make the system unuseable. It uses some resources (including CPU) and makes things a little less responsive or laggy but hardly unuseable.

really? what i described in my post - memory warnings, windows going to basic mode or whatever it's called (no aero), telling me to shut things down to free up more RAM and going so slowly that opening task manager takes minutes.

at that point, it takes far too long to try and reboot so to do anything within 20-30 mins i have to do a soft reboot.

under no circumstances is that usable!

CORGYk

i didn't have to do that under vista or win xp though.


so, i ask again people. is there a way i can put a cap on how much RAM an app can get access to? i mean, i want to limit chkdsk.exe to a max of 1GB. is there a way to do that?

 

[tcsenter]

How much RAM do you have? How large is your system pagefile? Do you have more than one pagefile or did you move it from the default volume?

 

[tommo123]

8GB in both PCs (both have the same thing going on).

i left the pagefile on auto after moving to an SSD. 1 page file per PC. both on the SSD drive.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Something else is going on.
I can run a ChkDsk on my 2TB drive that is on a SAT port and it doesn't bog the system down.

Is this 2TB drive the same drive you've tried on different machines that give the same results. If so, the drive or the enclosure is bad.
Pull the drive from the enclosure and connected it internally and run check disk this way.

 

[tommo123]

thanks for the reply

i cant remember if it does the same thing on the internal drives since they're not full. the ext is a back up drive so has more stuff than any 1 internal drive.

another external drive (different enclosure) does the same. windows was only reinstalled on both when i got sata drives early last month. it did this before then as well.

even if there was a fault with the enclosure (that still allows me to copy data to the drive, and from it just fine), there is still a problem in that windows doesn't limit the amount of RAM the process uses.


there has to be a way of doing that.

 

[Nothinman]

thanks for the reply

i cant remember if it does the same thing on the internal drives since they're not full. the ext is a back up drive so has more stuff than any 1 internal drive.

another external drive (different enclosure) does the same. windows was only reinstalled on both when i got sata drives early last month. it did this before then as well.

even if there was a fault with the enclosure (that still allows me to copy data to the drive, and from it just fine), there is still a problem in that windows doesn't limit the amount of RAM the process uses.


there has to be a way of doing that.

You can't limit how much memory a process gets and even if you could it would cause the program to crash or at least exit early when an allocation attempt beyond that limit failed.

It's possible it's not even a bug in that chkdsk wasn't originally designed to handle filesystems that large. Similar issues were been reported in the past for tools like xfs_repair, e2fsck ,etc on Linux when large filesystems become more popular. With smaller filesystems they could keep all of something (inodes, extents or whatever) in memory in order to enumerate and verify them, but with a large, mostly full filesystem it's just too much to fit in memory.

Have you seen this http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/08/10/what-we-do-with-a-bug-report.aspx?

 

[Rubycon]

How big are your clusters? 512 byte (1/2K file allocation units) can cause defrag.exe and chkdsk.exe to use enormous amounts of RAM.

Default NTFS formatting uses 4K (4096 byte) allocation units. FAT32 volumes converted to NTFS will always be 512 BYTE.

 

[0roo0roo]

yea fat 32-> ntfs conversion makes for stupidi small clusters, i had a drive that took forever to defrag using mydefrag, to the point of it not being responsive, turns out it was using 512byte clusters, rubbish performance. it all was good after i formated it to the default cluster size.

 

[Nothinman]

I thought convert.exe was fixed to not do that in Vista or so, but I could be wrong.

 

[Rubycon]

I thought convert.exe was fixed to not do that in Vista or so, but I could be wrong.

Now that is something I have not verified. Have not used convert since 2000/xp!

 

[Nothinman]

Now that is something I have not verified. Have not used convert since 2000/xp!

Same here but I have a vague recollection of having a similar conversation in the past and finding that they finally fixed that "issue". Of course they waited until virtually no one needs the tool, but that's about right. =)

 

[tommo123]

i havent' used fat32 for anything but flash drives.mem cards etc since win ME.

all my drives were formatted straight to NTFS. 99% sure it's 4K sectors as well

not smaller though

 

[Nothinman]

i havent' used fat32 for anything but flash drives.mem cards etc since win ME.

all my drives were formatted straight to NTFS. 99% sure it's 4K sectors as well

not smaller though

How many files? Lots of small ones, smaller number of larger ones? And it might be quicker to back them up, format and restore them.

 

[tommo123]

lots of fairly large. copied all my dvds, hd-dvds and blu rays to the drive (a backup is easier than the thought of redoing all those rips again! - took ages) , all my mp3s and other music files too.

 

[Nothinman]

lots of fairly large. copied all my dvds, hd-dvds and blu rays to the drive (a backup is easier than the thought of redoing all those rips again! - took ages) , all my mp3s and other music files too.

Could you move the MP3s somewhere else and try again? Lowering the number of files may help. This is why filesytems like XFS, ext3, ZFS, etc are better for large volumes. All of them but ZFS do have a fsck tool, but it's use is virtually never required.

And I don't think you ever said why you were running chkdsk on the volume, is there an actual problem with it right now?

 

[tommo123]

no, but wanted to make sure all was 5 by 5 and it reminded me of this bug in win 7

i could delete them as it's a backup drive and just copy them back over after.

i'm at work for another few hours anyway so can't do anything at the mo.

are you aware though, if there's a way to just limit the mem usage used by a specific process?

i ask as even if everything scans ok after removing a few more files, at some point i'll want to scan the drive again and don't think doing moving files around each time is a long term solution.

 

[Nothinman]

no, but wanted to make sure all was 5 by 5 and it reminded me of this bug in win 7

i could delete them as it's a backup drive and just copy them back over after.

i'm at work for another few hours anyway so can't do anything at the mo.

are you aware though, if there's a way to just limit the mem usage used by a specific process?

i ask as even if everything scans ok after removing a few more files, at some point i'll want to scan the drive again and don't think doing moving files around each time is a long term solution.

As I said in a previous post, no I don't know of a way to limit a process' memory usage and even if you did chkdsk would end up crashing when it failed to allocate memory. If you really want to scan the filesystem periodically you should look at another filesystem which would require another OS like Linux.

 

[tommo123]

i do want to try ubuntu again at some point (trying it as PC gaming - at least the games i play - is dying and see less reason to stick with windowS) and found is easier than windows in some regards, but, every time i tried it it failed the 1st test - network shares.

it could see the other PC but not see the shared drives.

i haven't tried again in a while tbf. there's also the 'have to go into terminal' thing that annoyed me.

might give wubi ubuntu another shot next week when i'm off work