New
#1
Disappearing files
All,
Several weeks ago, I received the dreaded, "Recycle bin corrupted" error. This is annoying as the recycle bin is a safety net, and being force to delete all of its contents means no net. Bummer - but I got over it.
About two weeks ago, my desktop gadgets stopped working. When I looked, I found that the the gadget files no longer existed on my computer - they simply all disappeared. I ran a full virus and malware scan but found nothing wrong.
Two nights ago, while updating some programs, when the system rebooted, it performed a disk check on one of the hard drives (claiming it had not been properly dismounted). After booting, I found that the profile file for my backup program and my XP virtual machine file had disappeared. Today, I again received the "Recycle bin corrupted" error.
As you can well imagine, I am now getting rather concerned. All of the problems have been limited to a single hard drive, the one with my /users partition. I downloaded DiskCheckup and checked the S.M.A.R.T. data, and everything appeared nominal.
My question: Is this behavior indicative of a potential hardware failure? If not, what else could explain these problems? Should I simply play it safe, buy a new hard drive, and clone the existing one?
Thanks for your thoughts and suggestions.
Some more info: I am running Win 7 x64, fully patched. My AV is avast!