Weird HDD error on my rig - what does it mean to you?

[Black Panther]

I was already going to post wailing that my Maxtor HDD failed, but upon reboot it functioned normally.

So, I had gone to upload a couple of photos from my camera into the 160GB Maxtor which I use for storage, and I got this:

The file or directory D:\$Secure is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility

When I tried to open any of the folders there I got:

D:\MyFolder is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable

Hovering over the folders it said they were empty, 0 bytes.

I never had an HDD which did this kind of stuff before, especially since I bought it like 6 weeks ago.

Another thing was the Recycle bin was appearing full and I had the option to empty it. However when I opened it there was nothing inside.

When I rebooted and got the HDD working normally, I checked the recycle bin and true there had been a file which I had deleted from that drive, it was visible now.

-Does anyone know what is $Secure?
-Could it be that this happened because yesterday to get (my legal copy of) Two Worlds game to run I was forced to go around the copy protection (http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=60572) by choosing a different time zone for my pc?

[thoughtdisorder]

Are you running Norton by any chance on your puter? :confused:

[spud107]

hmmm, files created, windows changed time, thinks files are created at a later date than present, so they dont exist yet? :wtf:

[KBD]

I got a similar message when i got a bad sector on my second hard drive. It told me that Drive H: was corrupt and could not be accessed. I couldn't get it in there and was forced to do a quick format. If you hadn't done diagnostics on it, do that, try the Seagate Disc Wizard ( I beleive they own Maxtor) or a Maxtor utility if they have one and Check Disk. As a last resort you may have to do a quick format and then recover your files with a recovery program. But DONT do it until you exhausted all other options and heard from more people on this forum. I hope this helps.

[Scheich]

Installation of the game might have done this, if your overclock is unstable, especially ram timings. Maxtor is not a good hd brand, they are known to fail easily, at least some years ago it was like that.

[DanTheBanjoman]

I would do what the error says, run chkdsk. It doesn't say so for nothing.

[Black Panther]

I'm not running Norton.

The thing is, after I did a reboot the HDD worked fine. That's what I find weird, though I'm not complaining obviously!
While it was inaccessible I checked the device manager and everything was fine, so it wasn't that something hardware related had failed loading or something.
(Duh I don't have much faith in Maxtor myself, I had bought that IDE originally for another pc whose components started failing one by one and since it was brand new put it in my rig for storage).

I'll run a diskcheck...

[Black Panther]

Update:

A whole month later...

Everything had been working fine.

Now I get this again:

http://img.techpowerup.org/080626/untitled.jpg

If I hover over each folder it tells me that it is 'empty'. :twitch:

I hope that if I reboot it will work again this time... :(

I wonder what is the root of this problem. Maybe my board doesn't like the IDE drive I use for storage? :ohwell:

Edit:
Rebooted and it worked. I don't know why occasionally it doesn't. I did't hear it spin nor did I hear the head making that 'maxtor' noise... (my maxtors always make a distinguishable noise from other brands of HDD's)... Now I hear it working OK. The sound of a maxtor (any maxtor) always makes me go 'huh?'

[francis511]

Ocing can cause strange data errors sometimes. maybe try prime95 to check stability

[Black Panther]

Ocing can cause strange data errors sometimes. maybe try prime95 to check stability

Thanks for the advice. However I've been running this same rig at the same OC for more than a year now, it's orthos/prime95 and TAT stable (10+hours) even at 3.2Ghz with RAM at 667Mhz though I leave it at 3.0Ghz with Ram at 833Mhz for daily usage.

I think the problem lies with the HDD. I bought it for one of my old pc's I have here. Thought its problem was the HDD but I was mistaken, so rather than let it lying around I decided to use it for storage on my rig...

[xubidoo]

mebbe try and rma it with maxtor ,a reasoably new hd shoudl not be doing things liek that ,if u cant trust it to hold data simply for storage then putting an OS on it is out of the question,and if it cant do that then imho its not up to the job it was bought for.

[panchoman]

make sure the hdd is mounted properly and is parallel or perpendicular with the ground, then, make sure you're ocs are stable, and make sure any software like norton isn't interfering, also, as banjo suggested, do run chkdsk to make sure everythings as it should be in your hdd.. also defrag regularly.

if it still occurs, try reformatting, and if that doesn't work, you'd probably want to rma the drive.