NTSTATUS 0x80000016 (STATUS_VERIFY_REQUIRED): meaning and diagnosis

Status / error code:		Category:

Constant name:
Source:		Operating System:
Description: STATUS_VERIFY_REQUIRED {Verifying Disk} The media has changed and a verify operation is in progress so no reads or writes may be performed to the device.

Could be also:
Constant	Type	OS
RO_E_ERROR_STRING_NOT_FOUND	HRESULT	Windows

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STATUS_INVALID_EA_FLAG	STATUS_EXTRANEOUS_INFORMATION

STATUS_VERIFY_REQUIRED

Media-change verification is a gate, not a surface scan

STATUS_VERIFY_REQUIRED belongs to the media-change path. After Windows detects that the medium has changed, the device can enter a verification interval. During that interval, ordinary reads and writes are deliberately prevented while the verify-related I/O is allowed to proceed.

Do not confuse this state with a request to run a full bad-sector scan. The status describes serialization around media verification. The first evidence to preserve is the media-change or unit-attention sequence and the request that triggered verification. In a storage stack, the class driver can interpret protocol-specific sense information and determine how the request should be handled.

Repeatedly issuing normal I/O while verification is active only reproduces the gate. The diagnostic split is between a verify operation that is legitimately still running and a verify path that never reaches completion because of device, media, or transport errors.

What to inspect

Media insertion, removal, changer activity, or virtual-media replacement immediately before the status.
The sense data or bus-specific media-change indication that caused verification to start.
Whether the verification request completes and whether subsequent ordinary I/O is released.

References

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