Data just mysteriously disappearing off my hard drive?

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ok, so it runs cool and your case is cool, thats awesome.. but sounds like it still never has time to rest and thats the only reason I can think of unless it's defective.. but I learn everything from my own personal screw ups and have cooked a couple of WDC 7200's in my time :D thats why I have a fan pointed dead on my OS drive.

is it covered under warrentie? you may want to get your files off it and RMA if it is.

This may be a shot in the dark but try Spin rite if you have a copy laying around.
 
With all this if you knew a specific file name of one the photos or other files that vanished you could use the Start>search option to run it over the entire drive to see if somehow files were moved into different folders. The files may have also seen some type of association change where they are now looked at as protected system files or you need to add a new file extension in order for Windows to see them.

You could be looking at corrupted copy of Windows since the drive tools didn't find any faults with the drive itself. You don't have security programs like Houdini installed there do you? Houdini - Software Database - swdb.net
 
No I don't have that program. It's not Windows because I just reinstalled Windows less than two weeks ago. I had the problem across multiple installs of Windows. I know the specific names but I can't search for them because I was able to recover the files off of my card in my camera and so I got them all back.
 
That particular program was simply a reference to the question of whether you were running a program like that now or at some point.

Have you ever verified files through Windows Explorer or another browser window after seeing files saved from the memory card? The software used there may be presenting you with false images of files in directories when none were actually saved to the hard drive.

Once you go back to look at some.... what happened? where are they? I seen that before on very few occasions where you see a ghost when the files haven't actually been copied or saved to the drive. The folders you or the program creates are still there while the files never were.
 
Its best to keep your 10K rpm drive for your OS, then partition like 5GB or so of it, and use that for your page file. Then grab a cheap but reliable SE16 640GB WD drive and keep the rest on that.
 
Many now are going with external drives for storinng everything there in case the OS drive needs to be wiped for some reason or simply gives out. But to not find any traces of files that were supposed to be there is rather rare.
 
That particular program was simply a reference to the question of whether you were running a program like that now or at some point.

Have you ever verified files through Windows Explorer or another browser window after seeing files saved from the memory card? The software used there may be presenting you with false images of files in directories when none were actually saved to the hard drive.

Once you go back to look at some.... what happened? where are they? I seen that before on very few occasions where you see a ghost when the files haven't actually been copied or saved to the drive. The folders you or the program creates are still there while the files never were.

I dont have any type of program that is designed to hide or encrypt files installed. I know the files where there when I copied them because I saw the progress bar come up showing that the files were being copied, the activity light on my camera was flashing, and Picasa was able to find and recognize the pictures after they were copied to my hard drive.


To further provide proof that they were there, after I noticed the files were gone, I opened Picasa and Picasa originally showed thumbnails of the pictures in the folder they were supposed to be in, then Picasa rescanned my hard drive and the pictures disappeared. This proved that Picasa at one time saw the pictures, and then when I opened the program after they were gone, the program could not find them anywhere on the hard drive so it deleted the thumbnails from its memory.
 
The problem was likely seeing them in virtual folder since you didn't verfiy them being on the drive by other means. I'm afraid just seeing the progress meter goes to show that Picassa thought they were copied while that never actually happened.

This may be why you are now coming up empty handed. Another thought would be they were simply compressed into one single archive when the transfer took place rather then seeing individual files. If you locate that being a form of backup you could then reload them into memory.
 
But when I copied them I did not copy them to Picasa. I dragged and dropped all the files from the CF card into a folder on my hard drive and the Windows XP standard transfer bar came up and the activity light on my CF card started flashing indicating activity.
 
Windows likely went through all the motions of copying while the files may have never actually been copied to the physical hard drive itself. You would need to verify the files were actually copied by using Windows Explorer later to browse to the folder itself to see if they were present.

It sounds like the copying process never completed while simply appearing as it had. All that simply happened with the card's light flashing which as it turned out doesn't mean anything until you later confirm an actual transfer took place. This is what I'm trying to point out here.
 
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