Broken hard disk8/13/2023 ![]() The key to fixing this problem is displayed toward the end of the error message shown in the figure above. The Test-VHD cmdlet is returning a status of True even though the error message specifically says that “the chain of virtual hard disks is corrupt.” To see what I mean, check out the figure below. The problem is that when a virtual hard disk checkpoint chain is broken as a result of mounting a virtual hard disk that contains checkpoints, then the Test-VHD cmdlet reports a status of True even though the virtual hard disk chain is corrupt. The cmdlet returns a value of True if the virtual hard disk is deemed to be healthy, and false if the virtual hard disk is not healthy. In my own experience, however, I have found that the Test-VHD cmdlet really isn’t all that helpful. When it comes to testing virtual hard disks, conventional wisdom often dictates using the Test-VHD cmdlet within PowerShell. The next time that you try to start the virtual machine, you will receive an error like the one shown below. This holds true even if you do not make any changes to the virtual hard disk’s contents. If checkpoints exist for a virtual hard disk, however, then mounting the virtual hard disk from outside of Hyper-V will break the checkpoint chain. I use this technique all the time when setting up lab environments. If a virtual machine is not shielded and is not running, the Windows operating system will allow you to mount the virtual hard disk and access its contents from the parent operating system. In the case of Hyper-V virtual hard disks, however, corruption often occurs as a result of a broken disk chain. I once had an external RAID appliance that corrupted quite a bit of data as a result of a bad cable. Sometimes corruption can be caused by faulty hardware. Why does corruption happen?īefore I show you how to fix a corrupt virtual hard disk, you may be wondering how corruption occurs in the first place. When this happens, you could restore a backup if you have one, but sometimes you can just as easily fix the corrupt virtual hard disk, and here’s how. ![]() I have seen several instances of virtual hard disk corruption over the years, especially on virtual machines that rely on checkpoint chains. In spite of the use of encapsulation, Hyper-V virtual hard disks are so reliable that they are used on countless production systems. Likewise, Hyper-V virtual machines store files in virtual hard disks, which is essentially an encapsulated file system. SharePoint document libraries, for example, store files in SQL Server blob storage. If the encapsulation were to become corrupted, then the entire file structure could conceivably be lost as a result.įast-forward a couple of decades, and the idea of encapsulation has been proven to be reliable. Ultimately, this particular feature never made it into Windows, but at the time I wrote some editorial pieces in which I said that I thought that the new file system was a bad idea, because the encapsulation layer could easily become a single point of failure. Among the things that Microsoft was considering was a brand-new file system in which files would all be encapsulated within some sort of database-like structure. Back in the days of Windows XP, Microsoft had some ambitious plans for the technologies that they wanted to build into their next new desktop operating system, which turned out to be Vista.
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