Ntfs Corruption While Doing Unattended Installation
In Windows the ‘Unattended Installation’ is an automated installation technique that is used to install or upgrade operating system with minimum user interference using an Answer File. It is a process incorporated to save precious effort and time of Server Administrators, System Administrators, System Analysts etc.
As the unattended installation is the automatic process, you could perform it only by running any of two Windows setup utilities, Winnt.exe or Winnt32.exe.
Performing such unattended installation is an easy and standard process, but sometimes it could result in system crashes as well. For example, in case of drivers that you can copy into the updated media image or optical disk will only be compatible with a certain hardware platform.
When you perform an unattended installation using Winnt.exe from MS-DOS FAT partition on a hard drive exceeding 4 GB, it might result into NTFS corruption. The installation parameters are specified in Unattend.txt file as given below:
“OEM Preinstall = yes
File System = Convert NTFS
Extend OEM Partition = 1”
After completing installation, when you first start your computer, NTFS corruption would be recognized, either by incapability to effectively start due to missing or damaged files of by following CHKDSK error message:
“CHKDSK is verifying indexes...
Correcting error in index %I30 for file 100
Correcting error in index %I30 for file 100
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK detected minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode.”
If the file system corruption is more severe, your computer might stop responding during GUI-mode part of setup or several error messages may occur. The error message may vary from computer to computer, but generally concerns the file system corruption of missing system files. The corruption errors are reported as the indexes of NTFS aren’t setup appropriately.
Cause
This problem occurs because the size of hard drive is greater than 4 GB. During NTFS file system conversion, the mirror boot sector needs to be written at the end of drive, but the byte compensate location is cloaked to within 4 GB of disk space due to 32-bit calculation. This incorrect calculation results into overwriting of NTFS index buffer and ultimately cause file system corruption.
To take care of this scenario, you need to format the hard drive with a better file system and install a fresh copy of operating system. It will fix all the disk data structure related errors. But along with the advantages, disk formatting also causes data loss by removing all data from hard drive.
In such situations, you need to perform partition recovery to retrieve your lost hard drive partitions and data from them. Partition recovery can easily be achieved using third party partition recovery software such as Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery.
Stellar Phoenix Partition Recovery software is a commanding tool. It systematically scans the physical hard drive and extracts all of the lost partitions from it. With interactive user interface and rich graphical support, this partition recovery software is very easy to use. It supports FAT and NTFS file systems and recovery from all file versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista.
Simpson Raid is a freelancer for Stellar which offers data recovery software and file recovery programs for different OS and file system.
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Ntfs Corruption While Doing Unattended Installation