- Mar 8, 2011
- 25
- 0
- 18,530
Hi,
(using Windows 7 64bit - 500gb hard drive, about 4 years old but heavy usage)
I was recently playing a not very resource-intensive game, whilst watching a movie on Windows Media player. The game crashed and I shut the window down, not thinking anything of it. These things happen occasionally, I thought.
Seconds after, I realised that a huge swathe of my Hard Drive had been deleted. I initially suspected a malware/virus attack, because strangely, the area affected was neatly limited to the folder C:\games and subfolders. Almost the entire contents of this folder was gone. Around 300GB of games had apparently been erased, although leaving their entry in the Add/Remove programmes screen.
So, I suspected it was something malicious rather than a hard drive error, which I assumed would be more random or widespread. Indeed, a virus scan found 2 rootkits hiding in the MS Security Essentials drivers and I installed Avast instead and removed them.
I ran CHKDSK and it found bad clusters (I think it was clusters), but only in about 6 specific files, which again confused me, because I could not understand how so few errors could delete such a large number of unrelated programmes. Perhaps hoping I'd removed the problem, I decided that bad clusters were just a fact of life. I'd not run CHKDSK for years afterall.
I set about reinstalling everything, hoping the malware I'd removed was the culprit.
Since then I have noticed that performance has not been great, although not bad enough for me to not think it may be paranoia as sometimes it seems fine and I had been installing and downloading a large amount of date. Also the hard drive seems to spend a lot of the time reading and writing. It rarely appears idle in fact.
What has caused me to write here, is that reinstalling one of my games a half hour ago caused a cyclic redundancy check error and the installation halted. I attempted a reinstall and it succeeded. I know this type of error is a bad sign, but again I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that they can occur sometimes...? I only appeared once afterall.
So, in summary: a huge amount of data vanished, the hard drive seems to be exercising its light a lot, bad clusters were found and now a cyclic redundency check error. Other than all that, it seems fine. ;-) Seriously though, I suppose I'm asking whether I need to get a new drive because reinstalling Windows and everything again is a big hassle and I'm perhaps ignorantly thinking that I won't get any more errors. I probably should err on the side of caution though right?
Thanks very much
Matt
(using Windows 7 64bit - 500gb hard drive, about 4 years old but heavy usage)
I was recently playing a not very resource-intensive game, whilst watching a movie on Windows Media player. The game crashed and I shut the window down, not thinking anything of it. These things happen occasionally, I thought.
Seconds after, I realised that a huge swathe of my Hard Drive had been deleted. I initially suspected a malware/virus attack, because strangely, the area affected was neatly limited to the folder C:\games and subfolders. Almost the entire contents of this folder was gone. Around 300GB of games had apparently been erased, although leaving their entry in the Add/Remove programmes screen.
So, I suspected it was something malicious rather than a hard drive error, which I assumed would be more random or widespread. Indeed, a virus scan found 2 rootkits hiding in the MS Security Essentials drivers and I installed Avast instead and removed them.
I ran CHKDSK and it found bad clusters (I think it was clusters), but only in about 6 specific files, which again confused me, because I could not understand how so few errors could delete such a large number of unrelated programmes. Perhaps hoping I'd removed the problem, I decided that bad clusters were just a fact of life. I'd not run CHKDSK for years afterall.
I set about reinstalling everything, hoping the malware I'd removed was the culprit.
Since then I have noticed that performance has not been great, although not bad enough for me to not think it may be paranoia as sometimes it seems fine and I had been installing and downloading a large amount of date. Also the hard drive seems to spend a lot of the time reading and writing. It rarely appears idle in fact.
What has caused me to write here, is that reinstalling one of my games a half hour ago caused a cyclic redundancy check error and the installation halted. I attempted a reinstall and it succeeded. I know this type of error is a bad sign, but again I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that they can occur sometimes...? I only appeared once afterall.
So, in summary: a huge amount of data vanished, the hard drive seems to be exercising its light a lot, bad clusters were found and now a cyclic redundency check error. Other than all that, it seems fine. ;-) Seriously though, I suppose I'm asking whether I need to get a new drive because reinstalling Windows and everything again is a big hassle and I'm perhaps ignorantly thinking that I won't get any more errors. I probably should err on the side of caution though right?
Thanks very much
Matt
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