Is there a showstopper bug in Windows 7 CHKDSK?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows 7, operating systems, Microsoft on
No, there isn’t.
Is there a bug at all? Maybe, maybe not. Several bloggers have noticed that if you run CHKDSK on a system with a lot of memory with the Repair flag turned on, it uses nearly all that memory. For an OS as undemanding about memory as Windows 7 this might seem like a bug; memory leak, shriek many of the reports. As it turns out, it’s by design. Microsoft assumes that if you’re asking a disk utility to repair your hard drive by marking out the bad sectors that you want this done as quickly as possible so that you don’t lose data and so it uses as much memory as is available to get it done faster; the other assumption is that you understand how demanding an operation checking every single sector on your hard drive it (and probably that you’re smart enough not to carry on working on a system with a hard drive that you’re worried enough about to be repairing in the first place). That’s not a bug, but it might be worth warning users this will happen.
What seems more worrying is that some of the testers had their systems crash when they tried the CHKDSK repair. Is that a bug? Again, maybe and maybe not; the problem seems to be with the drivers for the PC chipset and when those are updated, the crashes stop happening. That’s not a showstopper bug; that’s something that needs an update to warn you that you need to update the drivers before you run CHKDSK.
And even if the crash was down to Windows 7 RTM code rather than the drivers, that wouldn’t make it a ’showstopper’ that would ‘derail RTM’. In his usual hands-on manner (he once spent half an hour at a conference looking at bugs I was seeing in the beta build of 7 and trying out fixes on my PC), Windows VP Steven Sinofsky dropped by the original blog to calm things down and give a definition of showstopper; “Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC.”
One, this isn’t that severe a bug, and two, if it hasn’t shown up in the telemetry that Microsoft gets back from system crashes then it’s not affecting that large a set of people. The Microsoft testers haven’t managed to reproduce either the crash or the drive upgrade solution; if they can’t do that with their extensive internal test network then it’s not likely to happen on the majority of machines - and it’s definitely not a showstopper by definition.
But ‘just another driver issue’ isn’t as good a headline as ’showstopper bug’, so that’s what you see.
-Mary
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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