Unattended Installation Causes NTFS File System Corruption and Partition Loss
K. Madhav
June 09, 2010
Microsoft Windows operating system enables you to perform Unattended Installation to easily and quickly create similar type of workstations, by existing installation media. You can perform unattended installation in both GUI (Graphical User Interface) and CLI (Command Line Interface) environments. You can use this feature of Windows operating system to install or upgrade the operating system with minimum user intervention. However, under some situations, this installation cause critical problems of file system corruption and partition loss. At this point, you need to opt for partition recovery software to retrieve lost Windows hard drive partitions.
When you perform unattended installation of Windows using Winnt.exe utility from MS-DOS FAT file system partition to the drive that is larger than 4 GB, may lead to NTFS file system corruption. The parameters of unattended installation are specified in Unattended.txt file, as given below:
"[Unattended]
OemPreinstall = yes
FileSystem = ConvertNTFS
ExtendOemPartition = 1"
When you boot your system after completion of the installation process, NTFS file system corruption is detected either by inability to boot because of corrupted or missing system files or by following Chkdsk error message:
"CHKDSK is verifying indexes...
Correcting error in index %I30 for file 100
Correcting error in index %I30 for file 100
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK detected minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode."
If corruption is serious, your system might hang (stop responding) during GUI-mode part of the startup process and may cause several other errors. Such errors may be different, depending upon your system configuration.
Cause
This behavior of Microsoft Windows operating system may occur if drive size is larger than 4 Gigabyte. When file system is converted to NTFS, mirror boot sector must be written to end of your disk, however the location of byte offset is masked to within the 4 GB of disk space due to 32-bit calculation. Incorrect calculation of the disk space results into overwriting of the NTFS file system index buffer.
Resolution
In order to sort out this behavior of Windows operating system and retrieve lost hard drive partitions, Windows data recovery is required. Recovery is best possible using advanced and powerful partition recovery software.
The applications recover partition in all cases of partition loss, using high-end scanning techniques. With interactive graphical user interface and read-only behavior, they are pretty easy and safe to use.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the best data recovery software ever made to effective recover lost Windows partitions. The software recovers all NTFS5, NTFS, FAT32, VFAT, FAT16, and FAT12 file system partitions. It is designed for Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000.
When you perform unattended installation of Windows using Winnt.exe utility from MS-DOS FAT file system partition to the drive that is larger than 4 GB, may lead to NTFS file system corruption. The parameters of unattended installation are specified in Unattended.txt file, as given below:
"[Unattended]
OemPreinstall = yes
FileSystem = ConvertNTFS
ExtendOemPartition = 1"
When you boot your system after completion of the installation process, NTFS file system corruption is detected either by inability to boot because of corrupted or missing system files or by following Chkdsk error message:
"CHKDSK is verifying indexes...
Correcting error in index %I30 for file 100
Correcting error in index %I30 for file 100
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK detected minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Errors found. CHKDSK cannot continue in read-only mode."
If corruption is serious, your system might hang (stop responding) during GUI-mode part of the startup process and may cause several other errors. Such errors may be different, depending upon your system configuration.
Cause
This behavior of Microsoft Windows operating system may occur if drive size is larger than 4 Gigabyte. When file system is converted to NTFS, mirror boot sector must be written to end of your disk, however the location of byte offset is masked to within the 4 GB of disk space due to 32-bit calculation. Incorrect calculation of the disk space results into overwriting of the NTFS file system index buffer.
Resolution
In order to sort out this behavior of Windows operating system and retrieve lost hard drive partitions, Windows data recovery is required. Recovery is best possible using advanced and powerful partition recovery software.
The applications recover partition in all cases of partition loss, using high-end scanning techniques. With interactive graphical user interface and read-only behavior, they are pretty easy and safe to use.
Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is the best data recovery software ever made to effective recover lost Windows partitions. The software recovers all NTFS5, NTFS, FAT32, VFAT, FAT16, and FAT12 file system partitions. It is designed for Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000.
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