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Dual boot: chkdsk errors & missing files when writing to shared slave
So I am dual-booting between two physical drives: A host drive with Windows10 1803 (SSD/GPT), and a host drive with Windows10 1607 (HDD/MBR). The 1803 is a fresh install via M$ Creation Tool, and the 1607 is my daily driver. I have a SSD/GPT slave shared among the two for data storage. I dual boot by only connecting the SATA0 cable to the host drive I intend to boot from (I never have both connected to the system at once).
Here's what's going on: When I boot from one Windows10, write/delete files to the slave, then boot up using the other Windows10, some or all the files I just copied are missing. This only happens when accessing the drive from the other OS, if I reboot using the same OS after writing to the slave, everything is there.
All drives pass SMART, show no error values/counts in the SMART data, benchmark as expected, and otherwise exhibit no problems.
Other details:
- System host drives never have problems with data or corruption, problem seems isolated to a shared slave. It does not seem to matter which drive I use as the slave, and at least once I observed it occur on my external WD Passport (usb3, mbr) when using it as shared storage for the dual boot.
- Wiping/reformatting the slave does not solve the problem.
- Sometimes when files do show up, some will prompt me for Admin privileges when accessing. If I look at the permissions, they have no owner (says something similar to owner cannot be determined).
- Chkdsk will usually find filesystem errors, typically being index errors (missing/unused/mismatched etc), but I've also seen security descriptor errors, index pointers to files beyond mft, bitmap errors, and free space marked allocated.
- At one point, I modified a text file's content, and upon booting into the other Windows, only the old file contents were visible as if I had done nothing.
- If I do not allow chkdsk to make fixes and I reboot with a WinPE thumbdrive, the missing files in question are clearly visible and readable. I can also copy anything I want to the slave using WinPE and the files show up just fine in the other OS's
I haven't had much luck googling, as most results pertain to people who hibernate between dual boots or don't shut down properly. It really does feel like that tho, except I do not hibernate and always shut down through Windows before dual booting. Event manager shows no log of unexpected power loss either.
I've just tried disabling search indexing & fast boot from both Windows versions, and for the past couple of dual boots I haven't seen it happen again... Don't know yet if that fixed it or if this is just by chance.
Any ideas?
Last edited by shortbit; 13 Nov 2018 at 22:25.