Microsoft Fixes Windows 10 Bug that Corrupted NTFS Drives

Earlier this year, a security researcher disclosed a flaw in Windows 10 that allowed, with a simple command, to corrupt users’ NTFS hard drives , even losing data. This failure was generated when trying to access, from CMD or from any program, to a protected path of the disk, marking the unit as “dirty” or “corrupted” . Although this problem could almost always be solved by running the CHKDSK command, there have been cases where the data has become unrecoverable, making it a dangerous failure. A bug that, 4 months later, has finally been solved.

What is Windows 10 NTFS failure

NTFS is the Microsoft file system used on Windows hard drives . This system has integrity measures that allow us to be sure that our data is correct and is not being stored damaged on the PC. And beyond the folders that we can access, it also has private directories, used by the driver itself, which nothing and no one should access.

Microsoft Fixes Windows 10 Bug that Corrupted NTFS Drives

Due to a bug in the Windows driver, a program, or malware, could gain access to one of these private directories on the file system. And, by doing so, you would be corrupting the integrity of the data, with what this implies. This fault can be generated by any user without any difficulty. All you have to do is open a CMD window, with administrator permissions, and run the following command:

cd c:/$i30:$bitmap

As we can see, at the moment a message will appear in Windows that our system is corrupt and must be repaired . When you restart your computer, the file system will be automatically scanned and repaired. But if not, we can also do it ourselves by running the disk checker by hand.

Master File Table (MFT) - Error NTFS W10

This bug could not only be executed from CMD, but even other applications, such as a browser, could query those protected directories, causing the same error. Microsoft has been taking things too easy lately, leaving users in danger for too long. For this reason, developers (such as Mozilla) were forced to manually block these protected routes in their programs.

Better late than never, and finally, in March Microsoft started testing a solution on the Insider versions of Windows 10. And now, a month later, this solution has reached all users with the latest security patches.

Definitive solution to the error that broke the hard disk

After a month of testing on the Insider versions of Windows, Microsoft has considered that this patch does not give problems, and that it is ready to reach all users. Therefore, as part of the security bulletins of April 2021 , the company has included the patch to solve CVE-2021-28312 , that is, the failure in NTFS that could corrupt our hard drives.

After installing the latest updates in the operating system we can see that, finally, when trying to enter the protected path from a CMD window, a message now appears indicating that the directory name is invalid.

Solución fallo NTFS W10

Therefore, it is highly recommended to install the new security patches on the PC. Not only because of this NTFS bug, but also because of the other 107 bugs that have been fixed with the April 2021 patches for Windows 10.