How can I simulate a defect drive in Windows?

Question

(First question here ...)

I'm a software engineer, and in my team I'm also in charge of checking all logged errors that our servers or "fat clients" produce. When I see something new, I'm meant to fill-in a bug report, which, if at all possible, should include steps to reproduce the bug.

My question is: how can I try to reproduce bugs that arise from IO errors while reading/writing files (most likely due to either defect drives (USB sticks?), or unreliable network drives)?

It must be so that some drive/directory is visible and accessible from the "fat client" (Java), and only when trying to read or write from it do we get an error.

Answer 1

What you are asking for is a fault injection. Unfortunatelly, you are not enough specific in what kind of error you want to reach and there is a lot of different states from bad blocks causing read-write errors to no rights or disconnected devices during the process, etc.

This answer on another project will make you happy under Linux: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/144200/34745

I do not know anything like this under Windows. Surely something like this exist (with a side effects), so if there is enough for you to simulate network drive errors, you can use the Linux with Samba.

Update: There is a lot of professional tools described on Wikipedia article about fault injection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_injection

Or you can search Internet on "fault injection" which suits you needs.