Windows 10 Flaw Could Corrupt Drive

[Intuit]

Serious Windows 10 flaw could corrupt your hard drive if you open a folder

A security researcher has revealed details of a strange bug that could result in an NTFS hard drive becoming corrupt in Windows 10, as well as the unsupported Windows XP. What makes the bug so serious and unusual is that it can be triggered without the user having to open a file.

betanews.com

It seems that is being misreported.

It's been the case for quite some time that Windows automatically runs a scan whenever that message is generated; whether the message is legitimately generated or not. (Might be a Task Scheduler item that has an event defined as a trigger.) They seem to be under the assumption that the appearance of the message is validation that corruption has actually occurred. I opened a user privileged command prompt and typed "cd c:\:$i30:$bitmap". The corruption message appeared. I manually restarted the system, watched ChkDsk run, it rebooted into Windows as normal. Ran EventVwr.MSC, searched for "chkdsk" and confirmed that Windows has found no problems with the file system. Tried writing to the NTFS metadata file and of course access is denied; no such message about corruption or other was generated.


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Unrelated, we've seen a number of odd occurrences with NTFS bug checks lately on 1809 systems with healthy HDDs.

Microsoft Windows Security Updates January 2021 overview - gHacks Tech News

Today is the first patch day of the year 2021. Microsoft released security updates and non-security updates for the company's Windows operating system and other company products such as Microsoft Office. In […]

www.ghacks.net

Not sure whether it's actually ChkDsk that causes it though. That's something I'll be looking into. But to note, these systems are running third-party drive encryption which is known to be behind a long standing freezing issue (resulting from a cessation of all drive activity) on certain older Intel chipsets. The amount of time it takes for a freeze to occur on the systems that experience it, seems to be linked to the amount of disk activity. More disk activity, may result with more frequent freezing. One or two restarts a day may be required to workaround/avoid the issue. OS updates generate so much drive activity, there may not be a way to avoid a freeze, other than just decrypting the drive. The encryption software may have some incompatibility with post 1703 or 1709 Windows releases. (vendor has been made aware and may have a fix)