Files keep getting corrupted

I have a 160GB Maxtor hard drive that is partitioned into two logical drives of 80GB each. They are drive E and drive F on my system.

Drive E was my boot drive until I bought a new Hitachi because of what's happeneing.

My system backups and other files that are of a decent size keep getting corrupted when stored on drive E. I have no problems with Drive F at all.

When I run chkdsk it makes a bunch of repairs to the directory structure but the files still end up being corrupted when I try to access them.

I've tried formatting the drive a couple times but the problem eventually resurfaces. I'm running an antivirus with all the latest definitions. To be a boot virus it would have to be on the boot drive correct?

Does chkdsk create a log file? This seems like it would have to be a hardware problem and I'd like to format and re-partition drive E to get rid of the "bad area" if that's possible.

 

Windows 2000 Professional

Any type of files including folders, though it doesn't happen to all of them

It happens before I run chkdsk.

I run chkdsk /f

 

Hi,

In case someone else can't spot the problem, try running the Maxtor utility PowerMax:
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

It may be a problem with the "sector 0" where the boot records are stored, including the file system information.

If you want to completely wipe the drive, run a low-level (zero) format. This will write zeroes to every byte. You will then probably need the MaxBlast utility to repartition the drive. Avoid installing the MaxBlast drive overlay if you can. It may be what is causing your current problems if it has been installed (drive overlays don't like changes in the drive configuration). If you have the Maxblast drive overlay try reinstalling it (there should be an option to backup your current sector 0).

Suggest you set your partitions to less than 32gb in case your BIOS has trouble "seeing" partitions larger than this (I have max 30gb partitions on my 120gb HDD and I left some space unpartitioned for the future to partition with Partition Magic...and I think WinXP can form partitions without losing data.

Matt

 

I ran the Powermax program and it gave the drive a clean bill of health.

I ran the MaxBlast software that came with the drive and wiped out the partitions so there is just one. I formatted that drive as an NTFS volume used for storage.

I was cruising through the event veiwer and found a disk error. I can't make much sense of it, but it looks like there was a problem with one of the disks.

http://ee.domaindlx.com/forcedfx/Clipboard01.jpg

I DID get a pop up form Windows when I rebooted with one less drive than it was used to seeing and that I needed to restart for it to complete the installation of my new hardware. I don't know if that would cause the error.

After trying a whole bunch of different things it seems to happen when running a disk intensive program such as Azareus or BitSpirit for a while. Maybe too many disk reads/writes are confusing the drives firmware causing it to misplace data in the directory structure?

 

Update.


I've been running Azureus and letting it download 5-6 very large files for quite some time. If that doesn't call for a lot of disk read/writes I don't know what else will. I've also put quite a few winRAR compressed files on the drive so that I can test to see if any become corrupted.

So far so good, with the drive being re-partitioned and formatted. Time will tell.

 

Hope that does the trick.

If it starts happening again I might suggest checking whether there are updated chipset drivers available for your motherboard, in particular, the drive controller drivers....from that "drive controller" error.

Have you tried throttling back your overclocking? More than 10% is a fair strain on the processor .

Not sure, but it may be effected by the size of the drives cache (2mb or 8mb).

Matt