Corruption in D:\$MFT. How may this progress? I don't think CHECKDB is useful here? I have a server that is reporting NTFS errors; one of the error messages implicates d:\$MFT as being possibly corrupt. My SQL data files reside on this drive.

The Master File Table holds information about all files on the disk, so I imagine if the corruption was to occur SQL may not be able to read data from one of the MDFs or NDFs?

I imagine CHECKDB will not be a relevant consistency check, and the only way to resolve this error would be a chkdsk /r?

Any help would be appreciated. We haven't had any corruption reports in the SQL error log yet. I imagine it could get serious depending on what parts of the MFT are corrupted (as previously stated it could affect SQL's ability to read MDFs or NDFs)?

Thanks
Here is how I would approach that issue.

Take care of SQL Databases.


Full backup of databases
Restore databases to development/test server
Run CHECKDB on development/test server on restored databases to check for errors.


If errors are encountered when running CHECKDB then you should address those issues, it means corruption happened somewhere in the line.  Seperate topic for recovering for this. 

Take care of drive on server


stop SQL Server process.
run CHECKDSK /r on drive
Hope for best.  There are stress test utilities out there that can tell you if the drive is having problems.  If this is a single drive, then consider replacing it.  If part of a raid group, find a health check utility from the manufacturer and see if that tells you anything.


If CHECKDSK /r fixed the issue with the Master File Table then you should run CHECKDB on the databases again to make sure there isn't any corruption (or any corruption introduced into the files by CHECKDSK /r.  

Side Notes:


Do you have PAGE VERIFY by CHECKSUM set for each of the databases?
When you do backups, do you use the CHECKSUM option?