asked on

corrupted shadow files and huge winsxs directory

Hi, and thanks for any guidance,

I have a a client for whom I am checking the general healthof their laptop. Looking though the event log, I see a consistent series of the following event:

The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume \Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy18 (all 1-18 were flagged)

I have removed and re-established the pagefile, and this has not changed.

I've not seen anything else to better understand what may be at fault.

In addition, I noticed that for pretty bare-bones, one profile, and no collections, and little more than MS Office installed that an inordinant amount of disk space was used (70 GB out of 225 GB). From this, I used Space Sniffer to identify that the \windows\winsxs directory is 30GB!

I don't know whether these two conditions could be related.

Ian insight todetermine one or more root causes to either )or both) of these would be welcome.

Viao VGN-FW200, 4 GB RAM, Vista 64 bit Home Premium w/ SP2

Thanks!

aadih

So, did you run chkdsk or not (on the entire hard drive)?

Mark Litin

ASKER

Yes. Chkdsk c: /R and nothing was noted as needing repair... I did not scan the repair partition d:

And full scan with Malwarebytes, also with nothing noted.

Sorry I neglected to mention.

Thanks!

SOLUTION

aadih

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

John

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John

Also 30 Gb is about twice as large as I would normally see. I don't know if this is related to shadow storage, but delete your shadow storage as I suggested and see.

Make sure all Vista updates are complete and not pending.

.... Thinkpads_User

Mark Litin

ASKER

Thanks aadih

I'm considering an OS upgrade in place to Windows 7 (the client has a spare license). I'm thinking this will correct any OS-related issues. Do you concur?

Thx

aadih

Yes. Good idea. But I'd prefer a clean install, after saving your data, however.

John

Vista has been orphaned and so if you cannot fix it by my suggestions above and go for a rebuild, then by all means move to Windows 7 instead. Seven is vastly better and more useable than Vista.

.... Thinkpads_User

Mark Litin

ASKER

Hi Thinkpads_User

I agree about the usability of Win7 vs Vista. However, I hadn't seen your initial posts prior to my post suggesting a move to Win 7. That said...

I followed your recommended actions to resize the shadowstorage, and

a) the shadowstorage was set to 30gb, and...
b) that size does correspond to the winsxs directory size.

So, now the ntfs error no longer is generated and the system size is more reasonable.

Also, another error I assumed was not associated was corrected. So icing on the cake!

Thanks for the great guidance!

John

@mlitin - Thanks and I was happy to help you with this.
.... Thinkpads_User