Vista - Persistent MFT BITMAP corruption (CHKDSK)

I have an HP 32-bit Vista system -- Core2 Quad (Q6600) CPU, 3 GB RAM, 2 320 GB drives.

My intent is to have the second drive maintained as a clone of the first, sort of a poor man's RAID 1, and to separate data partitions from system (quite a trick, I have learned). NTFS partitions:
HD-1:
C: HP-1 58.5 GB
E: Vista Data-1 117 GB
HD-0:
G: HP 58.5 GB
H: Vista Data 117 GB
as shown when booted from second hard drive.

I set all of this up during July - Sep of last year, then moved and have only recently started trying to get set up in my new home. Within the past week, when I tried to use SyncToy to copy some files from a folder on C: to a folder on E:, it failed with an NTFS corruption error on E:. Other partitions do not have this problem.

Attempts to fix:

I have run CHKDSK many times, and most often it says it fixed the problems -- a second run finds the same MFT BITMAP corruption problem.

Using Acronis Disk Director/True Image, I backed up the entire partition to an external drive, reformatted the partition and restored. At this point, the corruption problems had disappeared, but they came back after I did another SyncToy run or two. I am running SyncToy beta, downloaded last August.

Nevertheless, SyncToy and everything else I have used seem to run OK. I continue to see NTFS corruption events in the event log, and CHKDSK detects an MFT BITMAP corruption, but CHKDSK can't seem to fix it. Most common error event: 55, NTFS:
"The file system structure on the disk is corrupt
and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on
the volume Vista Data-1."

CHKDSK (usually run from Acronis Disk Director) finds and "corrects" MFT BITMAP attribute corruption. It has also sometimes found and corrected errors in index entries and errors in the MFT mirror. Some of the time, I have run CHKDSK to do a bad sector scan, but it has never found any, and the SMART statistics on the drive show no problems.

Any suggestions for getting rid of my MFT BITMAP problem?

Is this problem serious? I.e. is it one of those things that appear in the event log, but which have no effect on behavior? Or is it likely to get worse if I am unable to correct it and don't do a save/reformat/restore frequently??

Thanks for any help.

Bruce

Hi, I had the same problem with Vista, after formatting the drive in XP with Acronis Disk Director I had the same errors, try to reformat but not with Acronis Disk Director, just use windows format NTFS in disk manager, hope this works for you like it did with me.