Whew!! Problem with overloaded HDD, or... virus?

[beaky]

Lately my faithful old main rig, which I've kept virus-free for years without having to run anything other than Spybot S&D, has been acting quirky... just random slowness, etc. Recently Windows in its infinite wisdom alerted me that one of my drives (the one primarily for file storage) was getting full, so I dumped a lot of garbage out and made a note to start burning discs, esp. of the myriad photos I have on there.
well, today, almost at the very moment I decided "after this task (editing photos), I'm gonna get some of this off that drive", when I backed out of the main graphics folder (not the MS "My Pictures" folder- I keep my own filing system), when I went back to that folder, it seemed to be empty. 30-some gigs of files... poof.  :o

I tried System Restore, forgetting I had it disabled... After Windows finished its machinations and rebooted, however, my folder was full again.

So... as the title says- do I just have an old HDD that's freaking out because it's full (although I defrag about once a month), or do i have a virus in there?

[AMDDDA]

Probably you accidentally put it in the recycle bin and System restore somehow undid the delete?

[Mushroom_Farmer]

[beaky]

My money's on the "Me Windows, me here to help you... duh..." theory.

There's no way I could have started deleting that massive folder without realizing it!  :o

[congo]

What if you had deleted it mate?

If you haven't got a backup plan, it might be time to get another HDD, even if this one turns out to be healthy.

You can also use an antivirus for a check, then just uninstall it afterwards. If there's a virus there, doing odd things, it's probably resident, so it should show up with a basic scan.

Full drives are aweful.

Is that you doing the towing or are you in the glider? Supercub?

[microlight]

I agree; a backup HD is the way to go. Having lost two C drives in the last 5 years, I've gone a little OTT with backups; a main 300 Gb backup drive (which also houses my iTunes music collection), plus two others (both with music folder backups!) which both have copies of my FS9 configuration and my photo folders, plus other stuff. Regarding antivirus: I've run AVG in the background for >4 years and have never had any issues with interference in the running of FS9, so I'd recommend leaving an AV program running. More memory is better than less, of course - but my 2Gb seems to be more than enough.

[packercolinl]

With the price of HDD these days (at least where I am) maybe try what I did.

I had upgraded(through an insurance claim---legit )my motherboard,CPU,RAM,HDD,Video card etc.

The new HDD was 240Gb and obviously running Windows and any other programs I installed---FSX and others.

Now as I understand it,when you load up a drive you give your computer more to read to achieve a given result and because everything you've got is on one drive it starts to get a bit cranky.

So what I did was use my old HDD 60Gb drive as an internal hard drive addition(it came up as F: in My Computer ),

I transferred everything that was unnecessary for the running of the programs on C to F.

60Gb is pretty small and I ended up with that filled as well so it was off to the shop for another 240Gb drive to replace the 60Gb!!

Now I have 2X240Gb internal drives.

C is obviously the program runner and F is simply storage.

The 60Gb now resides in another older unit as F drive freeing up the rather pathetic original 40Gb original drive(the original package at sale when installed used 25 of that 40,no wonder it was slow!)

What we have then is your C drive wholly left to run the programs and not have to read anything else to do it. And the less you have percentage-wise on your main drive the faster it goes.

And 'Defrag' is the word of the day----do it!!!!!

An external drive might be your best option I just went with what I was comfortable with and I don't know about externals but I had to format the new drive on mine and also formatted the 60 to really clean it.

Hope that helps

Col.