Windows : NTFS Warning The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

By | June 29, 2016

Having repeated NTFS warning entries in EventViewer as the one below?

Log Name: System
Source: Ntfs
Event ID: 57
Task Category: (2)
Level: Warning

Description:
The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

This indicate an issue with the filesystem recovery mechanism and the filesystem might not be fault tolerant in case of a failure. Every transaction (modification, write) on the filesystem is logged and written in the MFT (Master File Table), which is basically like a database that is located at the beginning of the filesystem (a backup MFT is also located at the end of the FS).

Long story short, if something happen (such as a power outage) and a commit/flush operation wasn’t performed completely, you may end up with corruption and unable to recover from it.

Attempt to fix the issue with the following steps :

1. Make sure there isn’t any related NTFS Errors, such as unrecoverable or block device errors. If you have any, I would suggest to look at the physical storage device which might be faulty. Fix/clone first and then go to the next step.

2. Open the command prompt with elevated privilegies and run the following command :

fsutil resource setautoreset true C:\

You may now reboot your server, it should be fixed (if the command completed successfully).