Is my hard drive crashing?? Need help.

[SoCalRugger]

OK, I've got a 2nd hard drive that I only use for storing music, movies, and TV shows. It doesn't have an OS or any important or non-replacable files.

A couple weeks ago, a bunch of my MP3s suddenly went missing. In one folder with a bunch of bands from A to Z, everything from Green Day onward suddenly disappeared. This happened in a couple other folders too, such as everything from CCR onward disappearing from my Classic Rock folder.

Last week, I noticed that a couple folders containing TV shows were no longer accessible. When I try to access them, I get the following error message.

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/2238/error0zf.png

I'm guessing clicking Yes would be bad, correct?

I've also been experiencing smaller problems, where two video files in a folder of 20 files will no longer be playable. The rest are fine (for now).

One thing to note is that while the files are disappearing, the amount of memory listed as available from My Computer does not change.

I've never experienced anything like this before. What's the deal? Is my hard drive slowly destroying itself? If so, I'm guessing I should pick up an external hard drive and transfer all the files that are still good, right? This isn't critical, since I can re-download everything I've got on this hard drive, but it's going to be a pain in the ass. Any advice would be appreciated.

[fluxrad]

Download SpyBot and make sure you've got an AntiVirus app installed just to be sure you're not infected with something. But yeah, odds are your HD is crapping out on you.

[SoCalRugger]

Alright, this is [censored] horrible. I went to delete some old shows on my main hard drive that I never watch anymore, and I'm getting the same error message as above. This is the hard drive that has Windows XP and some important files. So either two hard drives are failing at the same time, or I picked up a virus. But Spybot, Adaware, and Norton Antivirus all come up clean. Now I really need some ideas, if this isn't actually two hard drives going bad.

Also, video files and MP3s are the only files I've found to be affected so far.

[fluxrad]

Just to be a nit - are these two separate physical hard drives or two partitions on the same disk?

Also, is it saying "the disk in drive G is not formatted" when you get the error for the second drive or is it saying that drive (e.g. "the disk in drive H is not formatted").

[SoCalRugger]

Two different hard drives. The main drive with the OS is 200 GB, the 2nd one is 250 GB. It is saying Drive G is not formatted, which is the drive letter for the 2nd hard drive. When the error occurs on a folder on my main drive, it gives me the same error message, only it says Drive C. Also, if I try to delete a folder with corrupted files, it gives me a Cyclic error message (something like that). I can post a screenshot of that when I get back home.

[fluxrad]

Ok. I doubt you've got hardware failure on either disk since it would be extremely coincidental that both drives went at the same time. The most likely scenario is probably that you have a virus - and norton isn't picking it up.

Uninstall Norton. Download either a free trial of MacAfee or grab AVG home edition and scan again. Either way - grab everything important you can from your system and back it up. I'm betting you're going to wind up formatting.

[Sean D]

It really sounds like a virus and not something physically wrong. Many viruses/spyware/adware are deeply rooted and disguise themselves well enough to not be detected by regular av/spyware progs. I'd run HijackThis and head over to the majorgeeks.com forums to help you out. There are also automated online sites that will evaluate your HJT log files that you may want to try out. Don't go clicking yes just yet.