Microsoft has released a hotfix for a serious issue in Windows 7 that is affecting users with hard drives that have a larger storage capacity than 2 Terabytes. While that may only be a minority of users, the impact of the bug can be fatal on affected systems.
Computer systems running Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008 R2, with hard drives larger than 2 Terabytes, can experience full data loss on those drives if a dump file is saved on that drive, and some data of the dump file is offset at a disk offset greater than the 2 Terabyte address of the hard disk drive.
The operating system will crash on this event, generate a Stop code error message. One or more volumes of the drive may be corrupted in this scenario, with all data on those volumes lost.
The issue occurs as well if the operating system enters into hibernation, and saves the Hiberfile.sys file at a disk offset greater than the 2 Terabyte disk offset.
Even worse, the bug may affect the operating system directly if the hard drive includes the system partition, as it will make the OS unbootable.
Microsoft’s explanation is that the crash dump disk driver cannot address more than 2 Terabytes of disk space.
This issue occurs because of the crash dump disk driver (Diskdump.sys) cannot address more than 2 terabytes of disk space.
The Diskdump.sys driver can address up to 2 to the power of 32 sectors. If the sector size is 512 bytes, the driver can address up to 2 terabytes of disk space. If the actual offset is larger than this limitation, the driver incorrectly truncates the offset and saves data to a wrong location. Therefore, one or more volumes on the disk are corrupted.
Microsoft has created a hotfix that should only be installed by users with computer systems with hard drives larger than 2 Terabytes. it is recommended to install the hotfix right away to avoid possible corruption issues. The computer needs to be restarted after applying the hotfix.
Users without hard drives larger than 2 Terabytes do not need the fix. The hotfix can be directly downloaded from the Microsoft Knowledgebase.
Check out our Microsoft Windows forum for a list of additional hotfixes that have been released by Microsoft in the past month.
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Does this only apply to the actual disk size or the volume size too. For example, a RAID array with 6 1TB drives.
The MS article uses language such as “hard disk space”, but does not comment on volume size being affected so I assume it’s only in reference to actual disk size. Furthermore, it would seem ridiculous if it were in fact affecting volumes greater than 2TB in this day and age.
Anyhow, it would be comforting to have some clarification on this.
It is disk size from what I can tell nicbot. The title of the knowledgebase article says “One or more volumes are corrupted on a hard disk” which means one hard disk.
After reading the Microsoft KB2249857 article, it appears that the problem can apply to volumes.
The problem appears to pertain to incorrect addressing past 2 terabytes of disk space.
I have never used a RAID configuration, but from my understanding of the different implementations, software RAID of disks of lesser capacity than 2 TB should not be affected; whereas, hardware RAID can present a disk array to an operating system a single disk, and, if the RAID disk size then is greater than 2 TB, the RAID array corruption problem applies.
Yikes! This would be my exact concern along with many other system admins with storage arrays hosted on Win2008 servers exceeding 2TB (which most would).
I’ll be looking deeply in to this.
“The hotfix can be directly downloaded from the Microsoft Knowledgebase.”
Um, no, no it can not. :(
“The KB article has no public hotfixes.” after clicking on “View and request hotfix downloads”
Thats’s nitpicking ;)