Patent ID: 7293044

Claim:
In a computing system that runs a diagnostic program for determining errors on a live volume, a computer program product residing on a physical computer storage medium for implementing, a method of ensuring against false error reporting during an online verification process by finding errors in a shadow copy of the live volume, the computer program product comprising one or more computer readable storage media having stored thereon computer executable instructions that, when executed by a processor, can cause the distributed computing system to perform the following: receive a request to run a verification tool on a live volume in order to determine if errors exist thereon; based on the received request, create a shadow copy of the live volume, which provides a logical duplicate of the live volume at a point in time, and wherein the shadow copy is divided into a plurality of blocks; examine the shadow copy to verify an integrity of the live volume, wherein the shadow copy does not change during examination, but users still have access to the live volume during the integrity verification, wherein examination of the shadow copy can cause the distributed computing system to further perform the following: receive a request for examining each of the plurality of blocks in the shadow copy; determine if at least one block has changed in the live volume since the creation of the shadow copy, wherein if at least one block has not changed data for the plurality of blocks are retrieved and returned from the live volume, and wherein if at least one block has changed an unchanged version of the at least one block is retrieved and returned from a storage location where the at least one block was copied before it changed; and based on the determination of whether or not the at least one block has changed, examine the plurality of blocks to verify an integrity of the live volume; and based on the examination of the shadow copy, generate a report on the integrity of the live volume, which indicates to a user that one or more errors were found and that the live volume should be taken off-line in order to fix the one or more errors.