whole folder corrupted

Hello folks, not quite sure where this topic fits, so posting here. As the title says, I have a whole folder, filled with Word docs, notepad, Firefox pages, pdf's etc, and none of them can be accessed, the one exception being a music file. It tells me the Word docs are corrupted, the notepad just come up blank and .pdf's and photobucket images do not display. The folder is two years old, so the backup copy is also corrupted. I tried moving everything to a new folder in a new path, changing the name of the old folder - neither worked.

I am not too bothered as most of it is old stuff - though it does hold some work in progress that will get lost forever, but what exercises me is that A) I do not understand why this has happened and B) where to look for a solution should it happen again. There are no problems with the hard drive or malware, apart from this folder everything else I look at is behaving as it ought. If it were just Word I could suppose the solution lay in Microsoft Office, but to have all documents affected - where do I go to find a solution for that? Other folders are OK.... any ideas please?

Hard drive failure is a common cause (bad sector). Download the drive manufacturer diag, run it and see what it finds. To be safe, get an external drive and back up everything.

Regards,
GEWB

Thank you GEWB, I hear what you say and will keep it as an option. SMART does not report anything via HWinfo, nor chkdsk, nor sfc - I have SpinRite, I could run that I s'pose.. I was hoping there was a more local solution, perhaps in registry or a rogue windows file.......