Deleting corrupt files corrupts more files?


  1. Posts : 13
    Windows 7 Home Premium, x64
       #1

    Deleting corrupt files corrupts more files?


    Laptop: Acer Aspire 5552
    OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
    AV: Avast! Antivirus Pro

    I have an 2TB external hard drive (Toshiba) where I keep my music, movies, etc. About two months ago, I had an issue where the drive became inaccessible due to the data cable disconnecting during file transfers. The painful process of CHKDSK /F /R on the volume, which took about eight hours and found A TON of errors. I went through and deleted the corrupt remnants.

    A few weeks ago, I noticed that I had some newly corrupt files. I performed the CHKDSK again, and manually deleted any remnants. This time, the process was only about 30 minutes. To be honest, I performed CHKDSK numerous times between those two instances, but never found any problems.

    Now we're up to last night. I was going through some of my earth porn and found a corrupt file. "No biggy," I thought as I just deleted the file. However, deleting that file seemingly caused roughly five more to become corrupt. Deleting the five newly corrupt files caused ALL the roughly 100 files in my earth porn folder to become corrupt.

    I was at work when this happened, and just happened to have another 2TB hard drive with me. I connected it to my computer and attempted to transfer the files that are most important to me; my movies, music, and family photos. The transfer said it was going to take 14 hours, so I cancelled it being that I only had about four hours left at work.

    Upon arriving home, I initiated the transfer again, but this time it said it was going to take 19 hours. I set my PC alarm and went to sleep. Somehow during this time, the sound on my computer stopped working. My alarm never made any sound, and I woke up four hours after I was supposed to. The file transfer said 20 hours remaining? I clicked the little "More Details" button to see what was going on, and saw that it was allegedly transferring at 15.3MB/s steady. At this moment, I knew that the transfer had somehow became frozen. This was confirmed when I tried to adjust my volume via the tray icon and it, too, froze and Windows prompted me to End Process.

    Hitting the cancel button on the transfer didn't do anything, at all. My next attempt was to shutdown. Windows prompted me to Force Close on the transfer; "of course." After shaving and brushing my teeth, the computer was still attempting to Log Off. I held down the power button for a hard restart. When the computer restarted, the sound was working, and my external drives were still visible. That's great news considering usually, that type of action requires additional steps and time to get Windows to recognize your drives.

    Upon opening my Movie folder, just to ensure that I didn't receive an "Access denied" error, I noticed that my movie count is 804, where it was 1016 before this mess started. Over 200 movies lost during this interaction. I immediately opened the Command Prompt and began running yet another CHKDSK. No errors have been found thus far; it's currently verifying file data with 312,262 of 490,736 files checked (11%). It's been on 11% for the entire time I've been typing this SOS (haha), though the files checked count is slowly rising.

    The reason I typed all of this was to prevent back and forth trying to identify the problem. That's all the cards on the table, with events as they happened. WHAT IS GOING ON?! A computer technician, I'm not. However, I do have a theory as to what is happening and perhaps you guys can tell me if I'm on the right path, or way off in left field. The following will certainly contain the wrong terms, so I will used bolded words to indicate that I don't know if that term is correct.

    MY THEORY

    A volume is made up of bytes; 1s and 0s. These bytes are in a continuous string if viewed by a binary viewer and not separated into files as the operating system displays them. There is a file index that the operating system reads to determine where a file is located. For example, the file index indicates that the file WHOKNOWS.TXT is composed of bytes 1,028 through 430,305.

    If WHOKNOWS.TXT becomes corrupt and loses some bytes, but the file index isn't updated to reflect this, then there's a problem once the file is deleted. You delete the file, and the file index is updated to reflect that bytes 1,028 through 430,305 no longer exist as WHOKNOWS.TXT, yet the file, being corrupt, actually consisted of bytes 2,029 through 428,305... so the files to the left and right (in the binary code) are now corrupt as well.

    /MY THEORY

    Now, this may be WAY off, but that's the only way I can think that would cause the deletion of one corrupt file to corrupt others. Any help with this issue would be greatly appreciated!
    Last edited by enoctis; 22 Jul 2014 at 11:05.
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 21,004
    Desk1 7 Home Prem / Desk2 10 Pro / Main lap Asus ROG 10 Pro 2 laptop Toshiba 7 Pro Asus P2520 7 & 10
       #2

    Enoctis mate I would try running some malware scans if it were me try these if you haven't already


    http://www.superantispyware.com/

    http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free/

    http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/

    download from bleeping computer – delete any rubbishthese find.

    then onto Emsisoft Free Emergency Kit: portable malware scanner | Free removal of Viruses,Bots, Spyware, Keyloggers and Trojans < run only the Emergency and Command line scans

    I would be also running this
    Download Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 this is all just an elimination process - for starters.
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 2,497
    Windows 7 Pro 64 bit
       #3

    Deleting corrupt files corrupts more files?
    That kind of thing was more common with the FAT file system but very unusual with NTFS.
    File corruption would rarely effect other files.
      My Computer


 

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