Critical Windows 7 bug risks derailing product launch

tripwire45 · Aug 5, 2009

Critical Windows 7 bug risks derailing product launch

Oh boy! It appears that Microsofts glowing track record with Windows 7 is about to come to an abrupt and unceremonious end. According to various Web sources, the RTM build 7600.16385 includes a potentially fatal bug that, once triggered, could bring down the entire OS in a matter of seconds. The bug in question -- a massive memory leak involving the chkdsk.exe utility -- appears when you attempt to run the program against a secondary (that is, not the boot partition) hard disk using the "/r" (read and verify all file data) parameter. The problem affects both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and is classified as a "showstopper" in that it can cause the OS to crash (Blue Screen of Death) as it runs out of physical memory.

Full story at InfoWorld.com.

Sparky · Aug 5, 2009

New OS, same problems.

Will still buy it though.....

Modey · Aug 5, 2009

Apparently there is a fix already though. Just don't run Chkdsk /r on the secondary partition!

In all seriousness though, who doesn't expect bugs with a brand new OS? I'm on home laptop typing this using the W7 beta which has worked flawlessly thus far. I use the 64bit RC on my work laptop (which gets a lot of use) and that has also been great. I'll be perfectly happy to go with the RTM to be honest.

ThomasMc · Aug 5, 2009

Not a problem for me as I've always been a big fan of SpinRite

BosonMichael · Aug 6, 2009

Fix: del chkdsk

Done!

danielno8 · Aug 6, 2009

Steven Sinofsky said:

Hi there…sorry to get dragged into this. Of course always want to investigate each and every report of any unexpected behavior.

In this case, we haven’t reproduced the crash and we’re not seeing any crashes with chkdsk on teh stack reported in any measurable number that we could find. We had one beta report on the memory usage, but that was resolved by design since we actually did design it to use more memory. But the design was to use more memory on purpose to speed things up, but never unbounded - we requset the available memory and operate within that leaving at least 50M of physical memory. Our assumption was that using /r means your disk is such that you would prefer to get the repair done and over with rather than keep working.

While we appreciate the drama of “critical bug” and then the pickup of “showstopper” that I’ve seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level. Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC.

We appreciate the kind words that such a bug as above is “out of place” with Windows 7–we’re working hard. We are certainly going to continue to look for, monitor, and address issues as they arise if required. So far this is not one of those issues.

Some have reported (as above) that this specific issue repros and then goes away with updated drivers. We haven’t yet confirmed that either but continue to try. We just kicked off overnight stress testing of 40 machines of variants as reported by FireRx. We’ll see.

Let’s see if we can work on this one and future issues together. Deep breath

–Steven
Click to expand...

Source http://www.chris123nt.com/2009/08/03/critical-bug-in-windows-7-rtm

supernova · Aug 6, 2009

ThomasMc said: ↑

Not a problem for me as I've always been a big fan of SpinRite
Click to expand...

Yes i brought spinrite 6 must have been 5 years ago now. I know that Steve Gibson turned down several companies including Symantec who wanted to buy it.

However, spinrite has either stopped development or is at snail pace.

Steve Gibson was a talking about better NTFS file by file recovery, better SATA, USB and RAID support that was around the time i brought it.... i am a little sad that these havent been introduced.

Also the way it relies in SMART isn't all that good, because SMART results tend to be erroneous on many disks.

but over all its good.

JonnyMX · Aug 6, 2009

There's always something if you look hard enough.
'Our scien-icians found that be smearing jam on the keyboard, typing FORMAT C: and then pouring soup in through the air vents rendered a PC running Windows 7 vitually unusable.'

UKDarkstar · Aug 6, 2009

Critical Windows 7 bug risks derailing product launch

...or maybe not : http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1235&tag=nl.e019

Modey · Aug 6, 2009

UKDarkstar said: ↑

Critical Windows 7 bug risks derailing product launch

...or maybe not : http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1235&tag=nl.e019
Click to expand...

Erm, see Daniel's post.

tripwire45 · Aug 6, 2009

JonnyMX said: ↑

There's always something if you look hard enough.
'Our scien-icians found that be smearing jam on the keyboard, typing FORMAT C: and then pouring soup in through the air vents rendered a PC running Windows 7 vitually unusable.'

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that's a Linux killer, too. Might even stop a Mac dead in its tracks.

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