|
|
|
The Disk Integrity Verification feature of Driver Verifier monitors all hard disk access to determine whether the disk accurately stores information. If the data on the disk appears to change, a bug check is issued.
This Driver Verifier option is only available in Windows Server 2003 and later.
When you activate Disk Integrity Verification, you can choose to verify any or all of the physical disks attached to your computer.
As soon as Windows and its drivers are loaded, Driver Verifier begins to monitor all read and write actions made to these drives. Driver Verifier calculates a CRC (cyclic redundancy check) checksum value for each sector that is accessed and saves this value. The next time this sector is accessed, Driver Verifier recalculates this checksum and compares it to the previous value.
If the checksum value changes, this indicates a disk integrity problem — either the read operation is returning faulty information, or the disk medium has altered its contents since the last access was made. When this happens, Driver Verifier issues bug check 0xC4 with Parameter 1 equal to 0xA0. The other parameters identify the IRP making the request, the device object of the lower device, and the sector in which the error occurred. For details, see Bug Check 0xC4 (DRIVER_VERIFIER_DETECTED_VIOLATION).
When Disk Integrity Verification is active, performance is adversely affected whenever the hard disk is accessed. If your computer is low on RAM, this performance decrease is even more significant. You should use Disk Integrity Verification whenever you are investigating disk problems, but you should not gratuitously activate it when you are running Driver Verifier to test drivers.
The Disk Integrity Verification option can be activated by using the Driver Verifier Manager graphical interface or the verifier.exe command line. This activation will take effect after the next boot.
If you enable this option through Driver Verifier Manager, you can select which physical disks will be verified. If you enable this option through the command line, you cannot select individual disks — all disks will be verified.
See Selecting Driver Verifier Options for details.