How do I clean my dirty bit?

Question

For some reason, a large number of Windows 7 machines have all the sudden start invoking a chkdsk any time the computer restarts. So naturally I started googling around.

First thing I found was KB831426. I tried everything from it to no avail (mostly, but it did point me in another direction).

Next, I found out about fsutil. Invoking fsutil dirty query c: yields Volume - c: is Dirty. Interestingly enough, fsutil also lets you manually set the dirty bit on the volume by doing fsutil dirty set c:. However, I am unable to find how to reverse that setting. I even performed chkdsk /F and let it run all the way through to still have chkdsk run after every restart thereafter.

Finally, I find a forum that talks about doing a registry edit similar to the one in the aforementioned KB831426. The only difference is instead of setting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\BootExecute value as autocheck autochk*, it simply clears it out altogether. This does in fact keep chkdsk from running, but there are obvious issues with this: first, it would seem that if there is a legitimate 'bad shutdown', it no longer knows to do a chkdsk; secondly, doing fsutil dirty query c: still shows that the volume is dirty which tells me that something still isn't right.

My best guess is that this is related to an update because they all (50+ machines) started doing it on the same day. They are all Dell Optiplex 790's with Windows 7 Pro.

Where is this dirty bit stored, and how do I change it?

Solution

Microsoft released an update on 4/9 that is causing an issue with NTFS volumes to go dirty KB2823324. It is recommended that you uninstall this update to correct the issue. For some reason, Kaspersky antivirus is also affected by this update.

Sources:

KB article

Kaspersky

Comments

[wmz]

this raymond.cc/blog/… discusses it. I have not verified/tried it!

[Chad Harrison]

That would do it sir....