Usn Journal Message

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Husband attempted to do disk maintenance, defrag and A window popped up telling him that he needs 9% disk space and he only has 7. I was floored…he’s not a gamer and has Windows, three browsers, OE and some other things that probably use half of his 80 GB hard drive. I looked at the condition of the disk and the visual depiction of his disk and it was just a disaster…red all over the place.

I told him to attempt a chkdsk and see if there were any errors and as the chkdsk was moving along I saw that Windows was checking the “Usn Journal”. I have never seen such an entry. The “Usn Journal” was verified. I “googled” the USN Journal and there’s not too much that’s helpful other than I was able to figure out that it could be sign of file corruption or hardware failure of some sort. Therew as a recommendation that a “low level” format be used and the OS be reinstalled. I’m not reluctant to reinstall, but it’s not my PC. Reinstalling OS’s is my job in this house. He has a backup and we can salvage the stuff he wants to save to an external drive.

I would add that a couple of days ago, he was using his PC and for no reason known to us, the power went off and came back on as the the “C” drive was running. Could it be that the power problem made a mess of the disk? Believe it or not the PC is still running. But for disk maintenance he never would have known there was an issue.

I was going to see if I could get rid of the temp files via %temp% command and then retry the defrag, but I don’t think that will help much because he regularly uses CCleaner to clean out his caches and other stuff, but maybe it’ll give him enough wiggle room to be bale to defrag his disk. Can someone make a recommendation as to what to do next? Thanks very kindly. Luv the Lounge.

Diane

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^{I would add that a couple of days ago, he was using his PC and for no reason known to us, the power went off and came back on as the the “C” drive was running. Could it be that the power problem made a mess of the disk? Believe it or not the PC is still running. But for disk maintenance he never would have known there was an issue.}

I would run a checkdisk with the “r” switch (chkdsk /r), not from the os, but from a boot disk.
Sudden Powerfailures or loss of power during computing can leave drive errors and even boot failures.

What does Explorer say your total used Hard Disk space is?
.

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I would run a checkdisk with the “r” switch (chkdsk /r), not from the os, but from a boot disk.
Sudden Powerfailures or loss of power during computing can leave drive errors and even boot failures.

What does Explorer say your total used Hard Disk space is?
.

Thanks for your reply.

We ran chkdsk /r. It recovered a few bad sectors, but not enough to make a difference. I asked my husband how much space he could recall he had normally on the drive. He swore it was under 20GB. Explorer told me when I looked, that there was 6.5 left of the 80 GB drive. He did some disk maintenance and removed some old restore points and got back another 6…so we were looking at 61.8 used and 12.6 unused.

We then did some exploring on the drive, looking at each folder and found the problem. We looked at the space used by each of the programs on his PC. The folder with the 60GB immediately got our attention. I am embarrassed to say that we had no idea that our security system, setup with cameras & a DVR that we view over the internet, either here over the network, or remotely when we’re away has been stuffing backups in a folder on his drive. File was cleared out and the drive was defragged. We looked at the cameras over the ‘net and sure enough, it loaded backups onto the drive. “C” now looks like it should, with only 14 GB of used disk space. We also ran another chkdsk and there are no issues except that the “Usn Journal” is still checked and verified as the utility runs, but I guess if it’s harmless and just sits there, we’ll let it be. Thanks again.

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Thought I’d throw this in too…

@echo off
FOR /F “tokens=1,2*” %%V IN (‘bcdedit’) DO SET adminTest=%%V
IF (%adminTest%)==(Access) goto noAdmin
for /F “tokens=*” %%G in (‘wevtutil.exe el’) DO (call :do_clear “%%G”)
echo.
echo Event Logs have been cleared! ^
goto theEnd
:do_clear
echo clearing %1
wevtutil.exe cl %1
goto :eof
:noAdmin
echo You must run this script as an Administrator!
echo ^
:theEnd
pause>NUL

Make a batchfile of the above and name it “Event Log Cleaner”.
In Windows 7 64 bit, the event viewer can accumulate alot of entries, mostly meaningless.
This batch will help to remove the entries so that troubleshooting real errors are a bit more
clear and easier to find.

Usn Journals
It is common place for checkdisk to verify Usn Journals, index files, and security descriptors to name a few. This behavior is normal.

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Thought I’d throw this in too…

Make a batchfile of the above and name it “Event Log Cleaner”.
In Windows 7 64 bit, the event viewer can accumulate alot of entries, mostly meaningless.
This batch will help to remove the entries so that troubleshooting real errors are a bit more
clear and easier to find.

Usn Journals
It is common place for checkdisk to verify Usn Journals, index files, and security descriptors to name a few. This behavior is normal.

Thanks for the fine suggestion and your help.

Diane

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Have you emptied temp files and internet cache and other such files. These files over time can consume large amounts of disk space. I also am unaware of what the USN Journal may be. I would use an app called CCleanerto assist in this cleanup, then run disk defragment from Auslogicsto defragment the disk.

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usn journaling is the way the NTFS File System reconciles disk errors without having to reformat the partition. Over time, disk errors, usually in the Indexing or Security Parameters areas, will accumulate, and the NTFS journaling will have to reconcile more often. Also, Checkdisk operations will take longer as indexing gets more complex and introduces more errors. Eventually, the errors become too great for journaling to overcome, and the partition must be reformatted.

Without journaling, each error would have to be fixed as it occurs, and this can take a looooong time! Examples of non-journaling file systems are FAT-16, FAT-32, and the original Linux ext-2 and ext-3 file systems. More modern file systems all use journaling. Just remember, until Checkdisk /-r is run from outside of Windows, the errors are never truly repaired, and journal checking will take place each time the computer boots. Checkdisk /-r can be scheduled to occur before your next Windows boot by running Checkdisk from within Windows, but checking off the box to “fix errors”. Even if no errors are reported at that time, Checkdisk will run before your next boot, and some repairs may be done then. Or maybe not — Windows can be a bit flaky that way.

I recently did a System Restore on my laptop, and now each time the computer boots, it shows a progress bar (and nothing else) which works its magic in one to three seconds. Annoying, but not a problem, and booting is completely normal otherwise. I believe this is an example of journal checking before each Windows boot. Right now it is harmless, but things could get worse. Needless to say, I have made an Image Backup of the partition just in case things really go south. And I have a backup image from just before the problem which required a System Restore, so I should be OK.

This is one more reason you should be doing weekly full image system backups for Windows.

-- rc primak

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Nice one Bob
Thanks
CLiNT

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