Have All My Media Files Been Corrupted

Discussion in 'Home Theater PC' started by rogue20, Jun 19, 2009.

  1. rogue20

    rogue20 Regular member

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    Hi, i recently put all my preciuos medea files on to my new external 640GB hard drive from my other external and PC hard drives to sort out, organise, and prepare to back up to dvd.

    I found a media file with a wrong extention attached, i had found it on my desktop pc and had just renamed the extension, no problems, it played normally, but when i tried to do this on my external drive it went crazy, i could not stop it, the program stopped responding, task manager could not stop any process and then my screen went blue and i was forced to hard reboot even though the drive was being used, i did this stupidly in a panic as i was worried about my drive because of the amount of noise it was making.

    The green power LED on my external drive went off when i did this but the red in use LED did not, i had to switch the power off at the back. I have checked some of my media and it seems ok, the avi files have been run through VirtualDub's scan video streams for error's and have not shown any error's, is there a way to tell if any of my other media has been corrupted, or what are the usual signs if any and is it possible all is well and i got away with it, thanks and sorry for the long post.
     
  2. dailun

    dailun Active member

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    chkdsk/scandisk will check the integrity ofthe file structure. If that's OK, you're probably OK, you won't know otherwise until to actually try to use the files.
     
  3. rogue20

    rogue20 Regular member

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    Thanks for the reply and advice, got lots to check before i know all is well, i guess it's easy to over examine a video file, looking at ever minor little jump or stutter and thinking it's corrupted, but probably it was always like that and i just hadn't noticed it.
     
  4. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    External drives are good and everything, and all of mine are trusted and reliable. However i will only keep data on one if i have it on another drive, usually an internal drive (though i have data on 2 externals that have no backups other than on DVD, this will be rectified when i can afford to buy more drives).
    Mine are all USB2.0, all it takes is to not eject one properly and you could end up with an empty drive. Plus they can throw the odd wobbler now and then, as i say just make sure to keep copies of stuff you don't want to lose.
     
  5. rogue20

    rogue20 Regular member

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    Hi, i did have most of my data duplicated on both drives just in case one failed and was about to back up to dvd, i was moving files from my smaller 320GB drive to make more room for my most important ones and to get them in ordered groups.

    It just happened when it always does, when you least expect it, the last time i did actually lose all of my data on a external drive was the same, i was then backing up to dvd, it was late at night so i decided to start in the morning, got up next day, switched on, corrupted drive etc etc.

    When i can afford it i will have to get a bigger internal drive and have everything in triplicate, as to backing up to dvd, i've read this has to be done every 3 to 4 years to be on the safe side, as the data will start to corrupt as oxygen degrades the dvd's surface.

    I thought that a solution was at hand with the introduction of the new solid state drives, but on reading up they suffer from all of the problems of the conventional drives, i thought they were going to be more reliable with no moving parts but it seems they come with a whole new set of worries, no data could ever be retrieved due to corruption, accidental formatting, deleting etc, thanks and sorry for the long post yet again.
     

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