Windows 10 Missing folders and driver errors

[GTXPlayer]

Hi.

In the past few days I've been getting errors for my secondary (D Drive (HDD) from Windows. So, windows keeps telling me to restart my PC to fix drive errors. But when I restart, it does nothing, so I just ignored it because everything seemed fine... until recently...

Ok, so about 2 days in receiving these messages every 4 hours or so... I quit the game I was playing on my PC and went to take care of some non-pc related business. I came back to hop into Visual Studio to fix up some code I was working on. I typed "Visual" as usual into the Search bar and the icon and name popped up. Clicked on it to open it and I got something along the lines of "the program associated with this shortcut is no longer available. Would you like to delete this shortcut"..!

Immediately I jumped in Win explorer and realised that half of the folders from that driver are gone. Including my Games folder (about 300GB worth) and my VS 14.0 folder... but I have no idea what to do.

The drive still lists the space as being taken up, but it's nowhere to be seen.

Is this normal for windows to hide everything, or is my HDD dead? Where would I start to resolve this?

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

Hi GTX,
It doesn't appear that anyone has responded to this, and we have several gamers here. It would be helpful if you have us complete hardware specs if this is a self-built gaming PC. Mobo Make/Model, CPU chip make/model, GPU chip/make/model, PSU Make/Model/Wattage.

Have you attempted a virus/malware scan/removal yet? With what products?

Make/Model on the D: drive HDD too please.

In the meantime, you should take a look at my article on general PC troubleshooting which includes full hardware testing and software repair & windows reinstallation (you'll need to do this anyway if your HDD is borked).

Here's my article link: Windows 10 - Unclickable Task Bar
Start reading at POST #6 under my username BIGBEARJEDI.

This article will provide you step by step troubleshooting procedures that we Pros use here, and results in about a 90% success rate.

Give it a try. Post back if you get stuck along the way. We are here 24x7x365.

Best of luck,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

 

[Neemobeer]

chkdsk /r /f <driveletter> is you friend in this case and I would look in event viewer for Hard Disk related errors and post any you find here.

 

[GTXPlayer]

Yeah, I first searched in the Event viewer and found that it was deleting corrupt entries that it found. I ran these commands and everything seemed to jump back into place which was rather bizarre. I did it on both drives:

Here is the pastebin link, because its a large block of text:
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.14393] (c) 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All righ - Pastebin.com

However, you can see from the log that it's mainly the "WarThunder" assets that are being fixed, but it wasn't just that. Half of my drive was deleted including my secondary steam drive which has about 10 games on it.

Oh well, it's all back to normal now I guess. I've scanned for errors on the drive multiple times and everything is fine.

Thanks for the help!

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

That's good news!! Thanks for posting back your final solution to share with others too! And you're welcome.

Cheers!
BBJ