Try creating your own database snapshot of msdb and then run DBCC CHECKDB on that. I think you're still going to run into the same issue, but it's worth a...

Excellent! Another problem bites the dust.

Hmm - weird. How long are the pathnames to the database files?

Could be a privilege issue. Does the SQL Server service account have privileges to create files in the data...

Do you have any read-only files or filegroups in the database? That would stop it.

Also, did a previous CHECKDB get killed for any reason? There could be a hidden database...

Hmmm. Are any of the following true:

- you're running on a file system apart from NTFS

- you have zero free space on the drive hosting the database

I can't...

ok - it's nothing to do with your hardware. And yes, it uses a snapshot in all versions of SQL Server.

I wrote DBCC CHECKDB for 2005 - if you post...

That whatever is causing the problem has a periodicity of more than 3 days. You need to wait to see if it happens again.

Which database are you trying to run CHECKDB against when you get the failure? There are more errors which explain why the snapshot could not be created - can you...

Don't know - but it's something in the IO subsystem (whether virtual or physical)...

Power down SQL Server and the IO subsystem, then power them up again.

You've got corruption, and that's a known bug with database snapshots (which underpin DBCC CHECKDB) when that corruption occurs (sometimes).

See CHECKDB bug that people are hitting - Msg 8967, Level...

I don't know - totally depends on your IO subsystem vendor and what tools they provide.

I asked a few other MVPs for opinions and they all say the same thing,...

ok - looks like you've got something wrong with msdb (obviously 🙂 and it's in the IO subsystem - all operations are stalling waiting for reads to complete.

If the db...

You can't do a WITH TABLOCK CHECKDB of msdb (or master or tempdb) as that requires an exclusive database lock to run the allocation checks (equivalent of DBCC CHECKALLOC).

If it...

Best practice to start a new thread for each problem.

What happened to the database?

Please post the output from:

select state_desc from master.sys.databases

where name ='yourdbname'

If this is a time-critical issue, you should...