I may not be particularly enamoured with how badly Windows 8 handles mouse, keyboard, and window management right now, but as far as under-the-hood improvements go, Microsoft is packing. They’re redone much of the chkdsk utility, but they forgot to fix one important thing: rename the darn thing to checkdisk already!
Or, not, thereby insuring that the large number of people who know what chkdsk is all about won’t have any problems. Joe Schmoe isn’t going to dive into the console and discover what “checkdisk” is just because it no longer omits vowels.
Also, batch files will stop working and a lot of headaches will be had by a lot of sysadmins.
Also, shell commands are meant to be short; that way you can type them quickly. Microsoft PowerShell and VMS both failed to understand this and are pretty awkward to use as a result.
So you’re telling me that one “e” is going to delay your typing by a few minutes? Who are you kidding, little fella?!?
Ever heard of symlinks? Yes, Windows (NTFS) supports them. It is used heavily in Windows 7 to map all language specific folders like “C:\Programme”, “C:\Benutzer und Einstellungen” to “C:\Program Files”, “C:\Users”.
Adding a bunch of symlinks just adds excessive complexity for what is essentially a minor thing.
They’re redone much of the chkdsk utility?
From reading the linked text it seems to me as if MS just separated detecting filesystem errors and fixing them.
So now a FS scan can be run while the FS is online. Only for fixing errors the FS has to taken offline for a short while. (And it does not work for very severe FS damage, in those cases the scan still has to be offline)
So please correct me if I am wrong, but it looks as if NTFS health model is still miles away from ZFS.
It can fix certain errors while remaining online (referred to in the article as self healing.) Per the article, this has been improved to handle more things online in Windows 8.
ReFS does not have a chkdsk, and it can perform salvage entirely online.
Yeah that is cool. But how safe is ReFS? I would like to see research on ReFS first. As CERN points out, it is not trivial to make a safe filesystem, and CERN examined even Enterprise storage solutions. Even they could not always protect against Data corruption. It is very hard to do correctly.
yeah the one key feature missing is data checksums to know if the data has become silently corrupted.
The changes look good and should really speed up workstations and servers, its the servers im especially looking forward to, i hate having to take them offline to do a thorough check.
I don’t think ive come across a file system being completely un-salvageable under NTFS (excluding dynamic volumes) Ive had data corruption but generally the rest of the file system has managed to stand up to it. Overall i find NTFS a solid FS, handles errors well, as well as many files of all types, even when i don’t safely unplug external disk drives.
Completely off topic, i just wish Apple would invest in HFS+ or replace it with something else (ZFS would be ideal if it wasn’t for the memory overhead). As i find this the least stable of all filesystems ive used.
CERN says that it is not as simple as adding checksums all over the place. The disks got lot of checksums and error detecting code, and still they get corrupted.
Regarding Apple, Z-410 is a company that sells their ZFS port to Mac OS X.
i was hoping that something could be added just to check the integrity of files a little better on NTFS, similar to ZFS. It would be nice to now if there has been some corruption as I’ve experienced it a few times myself (again i blame HFS+ for this) i dread to think how it affects the servers at work. It would allow us to be a little more proactive.
thanks for the reminder, i did look at there web site a few months ago, I’m a little cautious and know i need to bite the bullet and just give it a whirl, i think part of me just hopes that apple will do something about their file system and i can keep my Mac’s as vanilla as possible.
Apropos Windows and Keyboard: I booted Windows 7 today to play a bit/let steam downloads run. Windows suddenly didn’t recognize my keyboard anymore! I had to change the USB port it so it could install it on the ohter one (OMG). And no, my USB port can’t be defect: I used the keyboard during booting to select “Windows 7” in GRUB. Yeah, Windows.
They wouldn’t by chance be USB 3.0 ports, would they? If so, it’s more a problem with the driver.
I had to stop plugging my mouse into my 3.0 ports because mouse performance becomes horrible when doing large copies to an external disk. Plus, gamepads won’t work on those ports for me.
From the linked blog post on ReFS:
“Q) What semantics or features of NTFS are no longer supported on ReFS?
The NTFS features we have chosen to not support in ReFS are: named streams, object IDs, short names, compression, file level encryption (EFS), user data transactions, sparse, hard-links, extended attributes, and quotas.”
Some questionable choices there… compression and encryption I can understand as not worth the complexity, but quotas are surely essential for servers? And transactions, IMO, are a good step forward in reliability, and only a few years old too. Those of us with Haiku/Syllable sympathies will be sorry to see the loss of extended attributes. Let’s hope these find their way to ReFS after all.
I must have missed that ReFS blog post when it first appeared: http://www.osnews.com/comments/25518
The problem was that almost no one was using those features, including Microsoft own teams.
As soon as Linux changes fsck to filesystemcheck
Dunno about Windows 8 yet. I guess it may be the way of the future. The previews were not as I’d have liked.
“checkdisk” sounds very VMS-esque. Perhaps MS could modify Powershell to have DCL’s shortest recognizable string feature, so that people could type CHE DIS instead…
Remote desktop is still mstsc.exe so good luck with that.