Running chkdsk, should SQL be stopped?

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Running chkdsk, should SQL be stopped?

jasona.work

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Points: 50084
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November 26, 2013 at 6:12 am

#395895

While I'm hoping I won't need to do this (we're migrating off the server in question,) I'd like to know what everyone thinks the best practice is / should be.
I've got a SQL server that's been throwing some errors, that seem to indicate potential disk corruption. This is a Sharepoint back-end, and thankfully:
A. The customer content DBs aren't being affected
B. The backups of said customer content DBs have been working fine (and recently restored to the new server)
C. It's a virtual machine so I can snapshot it prior to running chkdsk in case it hoses things up
So, should I arrange the downtime so I can stop SQL Server and then run chkdsk, or just run it?
I know with this being a VM, the problem could be the underlying actual physical storage, the trick would be proving it (I have no access to the physical storage.)
Thanks.
Jason

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Lowell SSC Guru Points: 323506 More actions · Answer 1

as far as i know, if you try to run chkdsk on a disk that is active in any way, it will tell you it cannot do it.

if it was the system teh operating system is on, it would ask you" do you want to run it on the next reboot"; it makes sure it is truly the only operation running on a given disk, even before the operating system starts up.

so if it's an additional drive with files on it, you'd have to stop sql server or anything else that touches that drive.

if it is the main drive(ie c:\) it will definitely require downtime and a reboot, as far as i know.

Lowell

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Jeffrey Williams SSC Guru Points: 90257 More actions · Answer 2

If you don't specify one of the options to fix corruption - CHKDSK runs in read only mode. As far as I know, this would not cause any issues for SQL Server - however, I would not recommend running it without taking SQL Server down just to be safe.

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jasona.work SSC Guru Points: 50084 More actions · Answer 3

Jeffrey Williams 3188 (11/26/2013)
If you don't specify one of the options to fix corruption - CHKDSK runs in read only mode. As far as I know, this would not cause any issues for SQL Server - however, I would not recommend running it without taking SQL Server down just to be safe.

That's kind of what I was thinking when I asked.