What makes my volume appear "dirty" to Windows?

[jakobkraft]

Three times in two weeks I have booted up my PC and have had Windows XP (Home) automatically run a chkdsk because it found that the volume was dirty. Afterwards each time it boots into Windows fine, but I'm getting increasingly worried as to why my volume keeps showing up as dirty?

Any ideas?

 

[RGPHNX]

Hi jakobkraft,
possible "bad sectors" on HD OR HD is failing. Check out HD with software program.. preferably NOT a Windows program (eg. scandisk).
Do some HARDWARE troubleshooting.
Hope this helps
RGPHNX

 

[Nothinman]

The volume is marked dirty once it's mounted read-write because there's potentially data in memory that hasn't been flushed to disk. I've had times when I just power-cycled a box and Windows didn't run chkdsk like it should have, so I'm not sure if Windows plays games with the dirty bit at runtime marking the fs clean when there are no dirty buffers or something. But in general it should run chkdsk any time the volume isn't unmounted properly, meaning the box rebooted improperly.

 

[Mark R]

A volume is marked as dirty in 2 situations:

1) Data was waiting to be saved to disk (in the disk cache) but hasn't yet been saved. The volume is marked as clean again when the data has been flushed out of the disk cache and saved onto the disk. If your computer crashes, or power is lost - then you may find that the volume is 'dirty' on reboot, because not everything waiting to be saved was saved.

2) Windows detected an error while using the volume - e.g. bad sector, corrupted index.

If you are certain that the shutdowns were normal (not a crash, or power being lost) then this may be because of problems with the data on the drive - either corruption or bad sectors.

It would be sensible to try the diagnostic tools from the hard drive manufacturer, and run a quick stability test on your PC with something like Prime95 and memtest86+.

 

[timswim78]

I suggest that you consider backing up your files now. I completely lost a hard drive once a few days after getting messages like you are getting.