DVD Erased My 200GB Hard Drive

[DarrellS]

I've heard of this happening but I wasn't sure how true it was until it happened to me.
I copied three DVDs for a friend of mine who purchased them from Hollywood Video (previously viewed). The first one had an icon on the box that said PC friendly and when I placed the DVD in my combo drive, a message popped up asking me if I wanted to installed some files on my computer so all the options would work and I pressed NO, opened DVD Decrypter and went to work.
Everything seemed to go alright. I burned all three DVDs with no problem but when I went to try and delete the folder for the so-called PC friendly DVD, I kept getting an error message telling me that the Video_TS folder was corrupted and could not be deleted. I figured if I restarted the computer that the error message would stop and I would be able to delete the folder but to my horror, when I restarted the computer, I was told that there was a question of integrity of D:\ (my storage drive) and that it needed to be tested and without any prompting from me, proceeded to delete my intire storage drive. Well, it left 10 or 12 files that had little importance to me but deleted every single picture file, every single audio file and every single video file.

This digital rights bullcrap has gone way too far when huge corporations can get away with destroying all the files on peoples personal computers.

[budz]

Acks! I wonder if that's what happened to one of my cousins pc. They bought a used movie from blockbuster and after ripping & burning they too couldn't delete the video_ts folder. But stuff on their hard drive wasn't deleted.

[guns1inger]

Sound suspicious that a DVD would do this. What disk was it ? I ask for two reasons :

1. So others with this disk can verify the action of this software, and

2. To warn others of possible issues if it turns out to be correct.

I personally believe it to be a combination of other factors that happened to co-incide with you working on this particular disk, but would be interested to see some imperical eveidence of it happening elsewhere.

[ybeard]

My only guess is that you accidentally might have hit Yes instead of No for installing the PC Friendly software. I'm a computer service tech who has also inserted hundreds, if not thousands of DVD's into computers over the last few years, I've yet to see problems occur with a hard drive except when someone decided to take the default and install the software. I've seen it wreak havoc with Windows XP Media Center Edition.

[DVD_NDN]

ooh ooh, wild guess.
what if....

the disc wasnt the origional disc. why not? I mean it was used right? whos to say that it isnt a backed up disc, that had a little present in it?
nooo, I dont know how it would work, or anything like that, but... theres people who would do it, I'm sure. and it wouldnt be much to apply a new label on it.. no?
did I smoke too much pot as a teen?

[pepegot1]

I experienced the problem that Budz mentioned above. I could not remove the folder, but no HD problems at all.

[DokSoul]

The movie companies can't knowingly put programs on their dvds to erase all your hardrive. Look at the flack Sony is getting over the small monitoring program they put on computers without telling anybody...and now their being sued by the Texas Attorney Gen. And I don't believe that Hollywood or Blockbuster are allowed by the film studios to make their own copies of movies, put virus software on it, and rent it to you..

I believe you had some type of corruption or bad cluster on your HD. Did you run a checkdisk?

[DarrellS]

The name of the movie is BLAST FROM THE PAST with Brendan Fraser and Alicia Silverstone. It's a 1999 movie so I doubt it's anything the movie maker put on the disk.
As for Hollywood Video not being able to tamper with their DVDs, I don't believe that. I read in another article where they were inserting something that would kill most DVD burners ( I believe that since I downloaded a trial version of either Vegas or Premiere that killed my Teac CD-Writer in my old HP and I had to recover the machine 6 or 8 times to get rid of the DMR file that they planted on my machine).
Maybe it was a time delay virus that was set to go off on Christmas Eve by some whacky Muslims, I don't know. If it was, my Antivirus program didn't detect it.
I had a problem the other day where my drives would only read and write at 2x speed and when I checked properties in Device Manager, Ultra DMA had somehow been turned off on all my drives. Either someone is putting harmfull stuff on DVDs, I've picked something up on the internet (I don't use filesharing software, IM programs, Outlook Express or newsgroups and I use as much security software as I can) or something is really wrong with Windows 2000.

I believe you had some type of corruption or bad cluster on your HD. Did you run a checkdisk?

That's what ran at restart to delete my entire hard drive. The few folders that were left behind were 0001.chk 0002.chk etc...
Windows had already told me that the VIDEO_TS folder was corrupted. Fine, get rid of it, that's what I was trying to do, delete the VIDEO_TS folder. Don't delete 99.99999999999999% of my hard drive and leave behind some worthless crap that I can't use behind.

[hudsonf]

I use to have that problem with a 200GB Western Digital hard Drive and DVDShrink. Every time I forgot and used Shrink to backup to my 200GB drive it would corrupt most of my files. For whatever reason Shrink was the only program that did this. I later started having more problems with the drive and had to replace it.

[Dr_Layne]

I had a problem the other day where my drives would only read and write at 2x speed and when I checked properties in Device Manager, Ultra DMA had somehow been turned off on all my drives. Either someone is putting harmfull stuff on DVDs, I've picked something up on the internet (I don't use filesharing software, IM programs, Outlook Express or newsgroups and I use as much security software as I can) or something is really wrong with Windows 2000.

I believe you had some type of corruption or bad cluster on your HD. Did you run a checkdisk?

That's what ran at restart to delete my entire hard drive. The few folders that were left behind were 0001.chk 0002.chk etc...
Windows had already told me that the VIDEO_TS folder was corrupted. Fine, get rid of it, that's what I was trying to do, delete the VIDEO_TS folder. Don't delete 99.99999999999999% of my hard drive and leave behind some worthless crap that I can't use behind.

Those .chk files are the data check disc was able to recover on your drive. It sounds to me like you have a drive that was failing to begin with and ripping the dvd's didn't help matters any by reading/writing huge amounts of data. The video_ts folder probably could not be delted becuase some Windows thought some program was still using it. Remember the old saying that still holds true today... backup, backup, backup. Never trust your data to your HDD alone.

[GKar]

[DarrellS]

Bummer. It is a Western Digital 200GB HD and it's only a week and a half old.

When I first built this computer a year and a half ago, I had a two week old 80 GB WD HD that Windows said took a crap an it said my DVD combo drive crapped at the same time so I bought a temporary 40 GB Maxtor and a new combo drive. The WD HD turned out to be OK since I've run it in three or four different machines but the DVD combo drive lost it CD ROM capabilities. I'm not sure if I'm just having trouble with my drives or if Windows 2000 just can't handle any multimedia tasks.
Guess I'll buy another Maxtor and as much as I hate to, get XP

[budz]

test your WD drive first to see if it is really failing. check out the WD website for the program to test out the drive. if it is failing you can get a replacement drive from WD.

[lordsmurf]

Coincidence. It would have happened whatever you saved. The drive has a bad spot on it. It may be bad, it may just have a bad spot that the computer needs to mark as unusable.

The Windows file thing is just a bug in Windows. I have a movie trailer on my computer, same situation. To delete the file, when a Windows error, just boot into safe mode. Usually safe mode Windows lets you delete. If not, use command prompt safe mode and kill it from DOS.

[Rich86]

Another suggestion:
Disable autoplay on all your optical disk drives so you do not have to worry about something being installed that you do not personally initiate.

[DarrellS]

Thanks for all the input. I think it was just a coincidence as lordsmurf mentioned. A combination of different things that together caused Windows to freak out.
I ran a couple of tests on the hard drive and it's OK and I took Rich's suggestion and disabled autoplay.

[Sartori]

I had a problem the other day where my drives would only read and write at 2x speed and when I checked properties in Device Manager, Ultra DMA had somehow been turned off on all my drives

I`ll put the answer to this here in context about DMA being turned off - its a feature of Windows XP that can point to a looming hard drive failure or er.. not in my case , if the drive encounters 6 "problems" with file tranfers it automatically turns off DMA (with the tortoise like speed that it also entails) - its called the PIO failback “feature” if you like .

I was experimenting with tweaking and it did to me , a search with Google turned up the "issue/problem" and its answer in the form of a registry hack which is needed to bypass a re-install . Ticking the box n device manager won`t cure it , it needs to delete a registry value to allow XP to reset DMA , but if your drive is knackered thats th last thing to be thinking about .

For info ONLY , I include the links

http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/

http://www.michna.com/kb/WxDMA.htm

From which I borrow this quote :

Possible causes for falling back to PIO mode
The most frequent use why a CD or DVD port falls back to PIO mode is a scratched or otherwise unreadable CD or DVD

[lambonut]

If you are having problems with CDRoms & HD's in the same computer, you might want to test your IDE Controller. The company I work for spent thousands of dollars replacing what we thought were bad hard drives in computers because they would come up with no operating system found. And after further review we found out it was actually defective IDE Controllers killing our hard drives.

Just a thought.

[Dogbert]

Have you enabled LBA in Windows 2000? I had the same thing happen to a 160 GB drive under Windows 2000 and lost all of the data. If you do a search for Q305098 you can find out how to enable LBA.

Without LBA enabled there is a chance of data corruption.

[guns1inger]

The problem with the above approaches is that it still requires a reboot, so is only marginally less painful than uninstalling the IDE channle and restarting. If PIO has become a problem, try the solution in this post

https://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=286408

[Rich86]

Have you enabled LBA in Windows 2000? I had the same thing happen to a 160 GB drive under Windows 2000 and lost all of the data. If you do a search for Q305098 you can find out how to enable LBA.

Without LBA enabled there is a chance of data corruption.

And - depending on the age of your computer - you may have to update some firmware to support large disc drives also. I recall having to do that on my Asus A7V motherboard.

[blinky88]

Removing the unremovable.

There is a FREEWARE APPLICATION called Unlocker v1.7.5

Unlocker is an Windows Explorer extension allowing you with a simple right-click on a file or folder to get rid of error message such as error deleting file or folder, cannot delete folder: it's being used by another person or program.

Helps delete locked files with error messages like:

- Cannot delete file: Access is denied
- There has been a sharing violation.
- The source or destination file may be in use.
- The file is in use by another program or user.
- Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Here is the link.
[/url]http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/System-Miscellaneous/Unlocker.shtml[/url]