It's possible that the drive activity you are experiencing is the
"SMART" system if your drive is so equipped. The drive may be active in
an attempt to diagnose and/or correct errors.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_drive>
I recently had a drive failure in the sense that the SMART system
advised me with an error message that there was a high probability of
major failure in the not too distant future. That warning had been
preceeded by enough noticeable drive activity over the previous month or
more that I had become nearly convinced of some possible virus
infection. Then I noticed that it happened even when I booted the
machine into Linux which let Windows off the hook.
So I replaced the (refurbished) drive which was only about 6 months old
and all the mysterious drive activity has ceased. Since then I've
learned that my Dell machine has a hardware diagnostic tool that runs
disk diagnostics in conjunction with the SMART system on the drive.
I think it's time to replace the drive. But don't throw it out. You
could also have a failing drive controller. I had that happen once too
but only on one channel which was not the boot drive's channel. Save
the "bad" drive until you're sure it was bad and that was the problem.
Also do like I do. I always have 2 backup drives. One in the house and
the other off-site.
Chuck Norcutt
On 8/21/2011 9:05 PM, Brian Swale wrote:
> Just to report something I have been suspecting for some time; now it is
> confirmed.
>
> Whole sets of my digital images are just vanishing from my hard drive.
>
> I am in the process of entering 3 images in a competition, and I wanted the
> originals to work on to make sure they were the best I could provide.
>
> I had copies of one in a "favourites" directory as well as in my usual logical
> folder.
>
> What I do for each camera is to create a directory for it alone which has
> sub-directories labelled D-1, D-2 etc. Each SD card-full gets placed in its
> directory, then the next goes into the sequential next - and so on. So this
> way I can manually search by date as well as by the number issued by the
> camera.
>
> Several classic shots of autumn deciduous forest scenes have totally gone. I
> noticed a while ago that I could also not find the shots taken of me skiing a
> couple of year back, and wondered what I had done.
>
> Sometimes I notice there's activity on the hard drive that I cannot account
> for - was this it?
>
> I need to find a way around this. Suggestions welcome.
> I do not have backup; time I did.
>
> I wonder what else is being deleted from right under my nose?
>
> I'm running XP.
>
> (A totally upset) Brian Swale.
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