Chkdsk on a LUN?

[jvann]

Our Win2k8 fileserver has been showing some NTFS errors lately such as "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume H:"

I'm not quite sure how vmware sees this drive... is it OK to run chkdsk on it? I've run chkdsk in read only mode and it found a bunch of errors, so it looks like this is what needs to be done. However, I know you're not supposed to run chkdsk on RAID. The drive is on an IBM DS4700 SAN and is connected by "Mapped Raw LUN". Are there any vmware tools I could run?

[AndreTheGiant]

Welcome to the community.

If your disk a RDM, than you have to check from the VM.

Andre

[RParker]

so it looks like this is what needs to be done. However, I know you're not supposed to run chkdsk on RAID

Not sure who told you this but it's absolutely INCORRECT. chkdsk has to do with filesystem, not RAID / hardware. The OS MUST be able to check the file system health which means running chkdsk.

RAID just means performance, but chkdsk doesn't impact performance, if it does your RAID isn't very good. chkdsk should not interfere, but chkdsk MUST be able to run for the OS to work properly, otherwise you can't fix problems.

[jvann]

Great! Thanks. As I understood it, it was the -r (check for bad sectors) that messed with RAID disks. I'll run it though on the LUN (from the nature of the errors, I probably don't even need the -r flag.) Thanks for the help!