Files Mysteriously Disappearing From Hard Drive?
Mar 24, 2012
A computer has a 1TB drive as the boot drive (C. It had 800GB of files on it. When the user booted recently, most of the files were deleted from the hard drive. I installed the drive in another computer, and the files show up as deleted. The computer passes malware and virus scans without issue.
I'm currently using Recuva to try to recover the available files (about 80% of the deleted files appear to be recoverable, but some critical files are not.) The recovered files are being saved to an external USB drive.
The only time I've had this problem before was corrected with chkdsk. I'm very cautious about doing anything with this drive until I have recovered all that I can manually.
It passed Spinrite with no issues. The computer is Windows 7 Home Edition 64-bit.
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Feb 1, 2010
I have a Seagate external drive hooked up. I back all my data up to it. The other day I accessed it and to my shock ALL FILES were gone. Poof. We're talking thousands of files. Weird though, the folder structure/tree was still completely in tact!! Every folder is there, it's just the files that are gone. I used Recuva This and got about 60% of it back. The other 40% is gone forever I guess. Very sad as there were about 500 family images that we lost.
Anyway, I add more files to this drive about three days ago to test. Sure enough they TOO are gone now but their folders are still there! Ugh! Important to note these files are NOT going to the recycle bin for some reason. They are just being zapped from the drive somehow.
SOMETHING/SOMEONE is making my files disappear. This drive is NOT being shared on the network. I ran scan disk and no errors were found. I have run numerous anti virus and spyware removal software and only found some spam trojans. Nothing of the malicious variety (that I know of). I also ran SeaTools and the drive seems fine. I have another USB drive and it is also fine and files are NOT disappearing from it.
Here is my HJT log if it helps.
Has anyone ever heard of this before?
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Oct 4, 2012
I have 3 drives in my system.Boot Drive2TB WD Black Caviar3TB Hitachi DeskstarThe 2TB will come & go. Sometimes its there, sometimes it's not. I have replaced the HD (it used to be a Hitachi), replaced cables, changed drive letter and even replaced the motherboard to no avail.
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Aug 12, 2010
I upgraded from Win XP to Windows 7 64 bit about a month ago (I did a clean install as I've always had issues with in place upgrades). My machine has four hard drives total, two internal SATA drives, and two external USB drives. For some reason my secondary internal drive, a WD 500 GB SATA drive (nothing fancy), keeps disappearing randomly while windows is running. This started about a week ago, it ran ok for the first 2 weeks or so.The drive comes back fine and dandy if I completely shut down the machine and then boot it back up. The drive stays until some random moment when Windows doesn't see it anymore. Now, if I do a simple Restart the drive doesn't show up, ONLY after I shut down completely, and push the power button back on, does this work. There is nothing in the System logs, no error messages, nothing, it just vanishes and is completely random.
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Mar 22, 2011
I have a custom machine that I just recently built a few months ago. Last week, I decided to upgrade the mobo so that I could have more ram slots and a second PCI Express slot. I swapped out the mobos, booted the computer, and everything was working just fine. The only problem is that I'm running Windows 7 OEM and I've heard that you can run into problems when swapping out hardware. My computer was working for about 24 hours after installing the new mobo but at one point the other day the computer just shut itself down. I went to boot it back up and all that popped up was BIOS. I inserted my Windows disc to try and repair my system and I came to find out that my Operating System, along with everything on the Hard Drive was GONE. I have never heard of such a thing happening. So I reinstalled 7 and basically had to start over from scratch. Another day goes by and the same thing happens. This is now the second time I've had to reinstall Windows 7. My computer is running fine now but I am afraid that this is going to happen again so I'm reluctant to put anything on my hard drive until I know this issue is resolved. I contacted MS but they aren't much help as I only have the OEM version of Windows.
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Nov 1, 2011
my hitachi external drive 3 tb disappears from My Computer every time I shut down the pc(windows 7).To reconnect, I have to unplug its power supply and then plug it back in.
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Apr 13, 2011
I am running windows 7. on my hdd i have two partitions. both work fine except when i view the space used on partition D: it shows i have used up 178 gig when windirstat only show i have used 124 gig. please can somebody help me find the other 50 or so gig
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Dec 13, 2012
few folders in my external hard drive are missing. I am running a scan and hopefully it'll fix, but it takes so long to scan the hard drive as it's a 3 TB hard drive.
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Jul 30, 2010
i am running 2 external hard drives and a Codemeter Ignition Key. All were somehow assigned their own identification letter (example: Local Disk E:, F: and so forth upon install. I had gotten used to the drives by those letters. Yesterday they all changed for some unknown reason. I tried "start - "computer" and right clicked on each drive and clicked on "rename." I was allowed to rename a drive with its original letter, but when I exited the original was there with the freshly changed previous one beside it. Eg; "Local Disk E: F:." I even tried system restore but the problem remains.Would anyone have some suggestions as to why this has occurred and how I can correct it?
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Jun 1, 2011
I use win7. I sometimes find that duplicates of my files and folders are being made without my knowledge. Nothing nefarious, just plain weird. I'm the only one on me puter (home, no network) and I discovered this one day by a search result showing four copies of the same files with the same creation date, but in different places.
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Nov 29, 2011
i used to save my files on the local disk D then one day i found the exact copies of my files located in the libraries.. i can see the same files on PICTURES, MUSIC, DOCUMENTS folders. all are the same! i tried to delete those files then this was happened.. my original files on local disk D was also deleted. now every time i make changes on D, it also happens on the other said folders.
my hard disk is getting full because of these duplicates
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Dec 24, 2011
I have a virus infected sata hard drive with windows 7 on it. It has the win 7 anti virus 2012 on it, and it's a cybercriminal virus. I have lots of files I want to transfer to the new sata drive. I already have windows 7 installed on the new drive. How do I get the files from the bad drive to the new one?
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Jan 21, 2013
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May 22, 2010
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Feb 26, 2011
my wife broke our laptop, i had all of my music on that hard drive and hadnt yet backed it up. the hard drive is still good, so i bought an external hard drive enclosure and put the old hard drive in it. i hooked it up, but am not able to get to any of my files off of it. computer recognizes it is there, shows folders, but wont/cant read files. wont open itunes or any other programs i had on it.the old drive was in windows vista, new computer is windows 7. does that matter?what do i need to do?
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Apr 15, 2011
I have a folder that that no longer shows any files in explorer. I right click on this folder, click on properties and see that there 171 MB of 59 files in this folder, yet in the explorer view it says there are none. Properties says that these files are not hidden. So how can I see and access my files?
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Feb 23, 2012
I am using Windows 7 OS. I had two logical partitions, E & F. I saw an unallocated free space on my disk. I tried to to mount unallocated drive to another
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Feb 9, 2012
I know there is a command in dos that you could you use to list all files on a hard drive
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May 28, 2011
I am a salesman in a tech department of an office supply store, and I had a customer issue stump me today. She had an external drive with lots of files on it she wanted to access. I took the drive, plugged it into a Windows 7 machine (HP quad), and all of the files appeared, no problem. But, then I plugged the seagate drive into her new Toshiba laptop (also Win 7), and only some of the files appeared. Missing were all photo files, and many other types. I could not figure out why some were missing and some showing. I took the drive to a third computer with Win 7, an MSI all-in-one, and behold: files were missing. Now it seemed almost arbitrary. Could it be a matter of some Windows updates not yet installed? Why would the exact same drive work differently on three different computers in regard which files were seen and accessible? None were "hidden" files.
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Dec 10, 2009
I just bought a new computer, i7 860 and have put 7 x64 on it.
my motherboard is ausus p7p55d and has one ide socket on the board.
I was using this socket for my cd and dvd drives but I have detached them so I can plug in my old IDE hard drive.
I was using the IDE drive just 2 days ago in my old system.
Sometimes when I boot up the drive is seen and sometimes not.
when the drive is seen I try and copy some files over to my new sata drive I have in the new system. some of the files copy over but the the IDE drive always gets stuck. when I try to cancel the copy windows stops responding partially and I cant get out of the copy window and the old IDE hard drive explorer window.
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What is going wrong?
How do I get my files off this hard drive?
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Jul 20, 2011
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Aug 11, 2012
I can see a generic storage device listed under the universal serial bus controllers in the device manager and am able to see the 'safely remove hardware' icon in my tray. Unfortunately, the only thing that I see in disk management is an 'unknown' disk. The hard drive is listed by manufacturer in the device manager; however, I am not able to open it from this site. And, when I look at the items 'attached' to my computer, the drive is not visible.
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Jul 20, 2011
I have a very strange problem. I have recently experienced that MP3 files and JPEG files disappear when I edit them. I have for example rotated a JPEG image in the Windows photo viewer and changed the album name on an MP3 file in windows media player. After this I can no longer find the file in the folder. The MP3 file can still play in windows media player but in the folder where the files used to be it says "folder is empty". What is going on? I do not understand it
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Sep 14, 2011
I was moving my pictures to different folders, I was dragging and dropping rather than copying and pasting, but I realized after I was done that they weren't being passed to the folders and they're also nowhere to be found.
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My computer is a Dell Inspiron 15, intel core i7.
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Feb 15, 2012
its been a long time since i last posted about my bsod and after i fixed them i began to get more of these. the only way i can replicate the problem is when i move or copy+paste files in the computer, mostly if it is from my computer to a external hardrive or usb... i attached the latest minidump file i got 021412-15958-01.zip
Edit: Go another bsod... if it helps i uploaded the minidump from that crash 021512-21153-01.zip
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Jul 10, 2011
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Apr 23, 2012
I've had this laptop for a few months now and I got another hard drive called Data which is empty, my other hard drive called OS is where everything goes and I wondered if I can move games and other files to my Data hard drive without corrupting them. And if possible can I move a file called Program Files to my Data hard drive without causing any problems. My pc takes a long time to restart which I guess my OS decides. My OS got is 80gb of 238GB and my Data is 332gb big, with no files in it.
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May 26, 2011
When I turn it on windows starts fine but no programs show on the desktop or start menu. I originaly thought everything was gone but all of the virus protection loaded and seems to run fine, and I can run the programs that appear in the notifactation toolbar. When looking at C: it is empty, no folders, nothing! In the add/remove programs it shows everything is still installed. So i am making the assumption that all of the files and programs are still on the hard drive and intact. So at this point i am trying to figure out if this is a hard drive issue or most likely a windows problem.
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Nov 23, 2011
It occured when i tried to open internet explorer while google chrome was downloading a file. However, I have always been able to do this when I attempted it previously, so I am not sure what made this time different, but after i clicked on internet explorer, everything i had open got immediately closed, my screen flashed black, and when it was back at my desktop, all my icons were gone aside from Recycling bin, Microsoft Word, and Powerpoint, and like 50 little message windows opened one after the other saying that files may have been lost because of damage done to the C drive. I cannot preform a system restore because it says there are no previous restore points, and all of my files (documents, pictures, downloads, music, programs) are no longer on my computer for some reason? Is this just a problem with my C drive that can be fixed and restored? Or are all of my files gone for good? Also, my PCtools Spy Doctor ran a scan and said: Adware.BHO.GEN (20 Infections) - High Threat.
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Jan 10, 2012
I consider myself relatively computer savvy, and I even talked to my IT-professional soon-to-be brother-in-law... but now I turn to you, BleepingComputer. I really need help here.Short Version:I keep all of my personal files on an external hard drive. That 1TB hard drive was getting full, so I bought a new 2.5TB hard drive. I start working from the files on the new drive. After about 30 seconds or so, folders just show as 0 bytes and "There are no files in this folder". The hard drive works on other computers (HP laptop) but not my Dell desktop. This has happened (sort of) with three different, brand new external hard drives. What would cause this?Super Long VersionI'm running a Dell Precision T5400 workstation with Windows 7 64Bit Home Premium. I keep two 1TB redundant drives at all times, synced monthly via SyncToy. The 1TB drives were filling up so I bought two 2TB Seagate external drives. And then this string of events happened:
1) Copied all of the data from the 1TB to a 2TB SEAGATE drive.
2) SyncToy'ed them to ensure that all of the data was definitely there.
3) Retired the old 1TB drive.
4) Began to duplicate the 2TB drive to the other 2TB drive.
5) In the middle of copying, I received the error, (something like) "Cannot copy files as the source file no longer exists".
6) Checked Disk Manager, and the 2TB drive shows up as RAW format now?! It was originally NTFS. Search Seagate forums and you'll find that this is a common problem.
7) Restart. Same problem. The other 2TB SEAGATE drive now has "USB device not recognized" errors.
8) Try restarting, copying over and over. Same results.
9) Plug both drives into my work laptop (Mac Bootcamp Windows 7 64bit). Both show up as "Drive needs to be formatted to proceed".
10) I format both of them and perform check disks on my Mac Laptop.
11) They're fine. Then I plug them into my Dell Desktop.
12) I run SeaTools on them. One has an error and can be RMA'd. The other is "USB device not recognized".I RMA them both and mail them in.At this point, I hate Seagate because they seemingly sold me two faulty 2TB drives.
13) I buy two new 2.5TB Western Digital Hard drives.(expensive. btw).
14) I un-retire my old 1TB drive and plug it into my Mac Bootcamp laptop. Disk has errors. Run the recovery tool. All seems well.
15) I copy my 1TB to one of the 2.5TB WD drives on my HP laptop (it's super old, and I had to go to work with my Mac)
16) I plug in the new 2.5TB drive to the Dell Desktop, and some of the folders show up empty?!?
17) Plug that drive back into the old HP Laptop all of the files show up.At this point, I'm super confused. There's clearly something wrong with my desktop?
18) I perform the following while checking the disk in between each new trial: system restore, uninstall USB drivers/host controllers, start in safe mode. Nothing works. Same problem. Folders show as empty.
19) Plug the drive back into the HP laptop. Files are there.
20) Re-install BIOS on the desktop. Folders show as empty.
21) Run Malwarebytes, HiJackThis... nothing out of the ordinary.
22) The computer doesn't fully start up when the 2.5TB WD drive is plugged in.
23) I run startup recovery. It spits out a bunch of errors. Fixes some, some not.
24) Folders show as empty.
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Feb 13, 2012
At the moment, my Gateway M-Series laptop which has Windows 7 32bit will not do a system restore! It says my local disc ( C: ) has errors, it cannot check these errors so that I can restore the computer
My computer doesn't want to connect to the Internet also (lucky for me I have other means of accessing the Internet) and every time I open Chrome or any of my software it says there are corrupted files and the disk check will not run because there are corrupted program files? I haven't downloaded anything of late I keep a fairly clean hard drive, but when I went into system restore it set one of the restore points as 'DirectX Installed' which incidentally I haven't installed and isn't in any programs list.
After some tweaking I found I was able to check the disk and restore the computer but I would still like to know if any of you have any input on how to avoid future problems!!
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