Cluster accounting failed at 135593 (0x211a9): missing cluster in $Bitmap

[Kent Paul Dolan]

> Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 04:48:40 -0600
> From: "Christopher Lemire" <christopher.lemire at gmail.com>

> Without really knowing what I was doing, I opened
> up command prompt and tried what you said. What
> does this mean?

> C:\Documents and Settings\Christopher L>chkntfs C:
> The type of the file system is NTFS.
> C: is not dirty.

1) that it didn't do anything useful
2) that your file system was the one you expected
3) that your file system hasn't been written to
   since you rebooted/since the last purge of memory
   buffers for the disk to the disk.
4) that doesn't help, though, since your file system
   is broken at reboot already, and is causing you
   crashes.

Using MS-Windows, look at the output of "chkdsk /?"
and you'll see a list of optional flags for running
chkdsk. What you probably want to do is a "chkdsk /F
/R /X"; however, the OS will probably stop you from
doing that, because it is using the disk drive at
the time, and it can't _check_ the disk when dozens
of processes are busily _writing to_ the disk.

What chkdsk does for me when I run it in that
situaiton is then to ask me if I want to set a
"chkdsk /F" to run _at the next reboot_. If I say
yes, and then reboot, a long, long check and fix
runs (in my case, about 90 minutes for a 160G laptop
hard drive).

This run has the nasty misfeature that it writes its
intermediate output on the screen, usually after
you've long gotten bored and walked away, and then
erases it at the end of the chkdsk run, before you
can return to see it.

When the chkdsk run is complete, it is then a good
idea to reboot one more time, to get the in-memory
maps of what parts of the disk are in use rebuilt.

At that point you should be back to the status quo
ante your mishap, except you'll probably have lost
the one 64Kbyte or so image file.

The usual _cause_ of such a problem in the first
place is shutting down the computer from either OS
forcefully, or by a hard crash, without giving the
system time to "flush buffers" to bring the hard
drive back to a consistent state, so do everything
you can to avoid such forceful shutdowns.

HTH

xanthian.