Running Extensive Stress Test May Cause File System Corruption in Windows

In computing, stress test is a process to testing a system by putting great emphasis on availability, error handling, and robustness under heavy load. It is done to ensure that the system does not fail or crash in situations where sufficient computational resources are not available. However sometimes it can create problems and cause system failure. Such behaviors can also lead critical data loss in some cases. In such critical circumstances, an absolute and valid backup of your valuable data proves great help. But, if backup is not available, data recovery software are required to get your mission-critical data recovered.

In a practical scenario, you may come across file system corruption and file corruption like situations when you run extensive stress test on an NTFS (New Technology File System) partition on Windows 2003 Server computer.

After this behavior, you may not be able to access Windows hard drive partitions and stored data. To retrieve lost data in the event of system failure, you must find out the cause of this behavior and then perform data recovery by fixing it.

Cause

This issue may occur only if all the below conditions are true when stress test is run for many hours:

Your Windows computer has small NTFS file system partitions.

The NTFS file system partition on your hard drive is almost full or full.

Almost 1,000 delete, create, or extend operations are run simultaneously.

Your Windows system has multiple processors.

Resolution

The above problem is quite improbably to take place if the underwritten conditions are true: Your system has a large NTFS file system partitions. This behavior generally occurs on the small NTFS file system partitions, which range from 1-24 GB (Gigabytes). As partition becomes larger, the possibilities of corruption are significantly decreased.

Free extend, create, or delete operations occur.

The database writes and reads are limited to the files, to which you have already allocated space on the hard drive.

If you do not take the above precautions, serious data loss situations occur and data recovery tools become the last resort to fix it.

The data recovery software are specifically developed to thoroughly scan entire hard drive and extract all lost, missing, and inaccessible data from it. They work in all possible data loss scenarios, ranging from accidental deletion to serious system crash.