Win 2000 Server froze - NTFS Event ID: 55

First post here. I have heard some good things about this site and am hoping to get some additional help. This is a production SQL Server that last night froze up requiring a restart this morning. Everything came back up fine but i did find ONE Event log entry: Source: NTFS Category: Disk Event ID: 55 Desc: The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:. I ran "chkdsk c:" twice from the command prompt in read-only and only got to 22% in Step 2. The final message said that chkdsk cannot continue in read-only and to basically schedule and run the real thing. I know in SOME cases "chkdsk" can screw up OS's. Plus this is a Production Server and backups are up to date. Any possbile ideas other than chkdsk and apps that require restarts? Thanks ahead of time!!

Well, file system trouble is a pretty routine matinenance item. It can be caused by processes being shut down incorrectly, hard drive trouble, loose power cords, or power failures. The first thing to do is run the chkdsk scan. However, I suggest you do a full surface scan on the hard drive also which might be an underlying cause of the problem. Do you know if this is a RAID system or is it a stand alone hard drive? Run the chkdsk /r command in order to perform a surface scan also. Do this during a time when the server can be down for an hour or even a little longer. Its good you have your backups in place. Based on the information you have provided, this is the best advice I can give you. If you happen to see messages about windows replacing bad clusters on the hard drive during the chkdsk scan you might be dealing with hard drive failure.

Thanks for the update. It is actually a RAID5 setup with five HD's. I havent notived any more event log entries since that one. I will run checkdisk when I have a few hours to take down the Server. Thanks, I will update thread once completed!

To close out this topic, I ran a complete check disk that deleted a WINMGT index entry (If I remember correctly). Other than that the Server came back up and no new NTFS error entries were recorded. Even during normal operations before I ran checkdisk, the NTFS error msg never regenerated in the event log other than the single time I mentioned in the original post. All seems good now.