Date: 01/20/07 (Computer Help)    Keywords: virus

Basic info: Windows XP Pro running on a computer I built from a barebones kit a couple years ago. Pentium 4 2.8 gHz, 512 MB RAM etc. I'm running a legal version of Norton Anti-Virus with up-to-date virus info and all of my virus scans have come back clean. I also tried Trend Micro House Call, same.

I have two hard drives. C is its own separate drive and just as Windows and my apps. The second hard drive is partitioned into D and E and has no OS. D contains all of my multimedia (large quantities of images), E is miscellaneous, unorganized back-ups.

Over the last month or so, I've started to have problems with still images stored on the D drive. A couple would just stop working and I suppose become corrupt. Windows Picture Viewer would say "No preview available" and the image would no longer open in Photoshop or whatever. At first I thought these were PNGs that had been saved with the wrong file extension but in the last week, the problem has gotten worse. JPEGs that worked fine that I have had backed up for several years are becoming corrupt and Windows Explorer started to crash when accessing a certain folder (the "humor" folder of images, ironically).

Upon restarting my computer, Windows would occasionally run some sort of file recovery for "orphaned files" and this would solve the problem but no longer. It seems like every time I move files from one folder to another (all on the D partition), more images are corrupted and more folders have started causing Explorer to crash.

Again, I have updated by virus definitions several times and run two different virus scans to no avail. I opened one e-mail 3-5 months ago that Norton notified me of containing a virus but it was caught and there weren't any problems after that (till recently).

I have tried defragmenting the drive but it always shows up as being a whopping 1-3% fragmented.

I am in the process of going through each subfolder with Bad Copy but it's a very slow process and in spite of Bad Copy's claims, it is not fixing my spontaneously corrupted images.

For whatever reason, the E partition of this same hard drive hasn't had any problems, but it only sees about 5% of the use that the D drive does.

I'm GUESSING my hard drive is failing but... is this the case? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to save the data that remains in tact? Why are image files slowly getting eaten? It's 15 GB for starters. I was going to copy everything over to my husband's back-up drive but every time Windows comes across a corrupt file, it halts the copying process. As of now, I'm using Nero Backup for the first time and... I have no idea what I'll do after that. Go through every subfolder with BadCopy, I guess.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Sorry for the long post and thanks for your time.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/738278.html