Movies getting "Zero'd out"

[majmattmason]

My apologies if this is in the wrong place, I wasn't sure where this would fit.

I have my VGX-XL2A (Windows 7) system set up with a single boot drive and a D: drive set as a RAID. There is a folder called Movies, which contains various MPEG, AVI, MP4, etc, files. I discovered last night some would no longer play. After some analysis, I found that the movie files were filled with 0s (nulls). The size hasn't changed, the creation and modify dates didn't change, but now the file is just a bunch of 0s, no data.

I checked for the usual suspects (viruses, etc), but nothing. I checked my own desktop, in case my system was reaching across and zeroing out the files, but that checked out clean, too.

I've had corrupted files before. They would always have some kind of data, even if it was garbage. Again, the entire file consisted of 0s, as if these were intentionally cleared so that I would only notice when I actually tried to play them.

Any thoughts?

[Oliver]

Hi majmattmason


I think this might be best placed in the VGX-XL hardware or software section, I'll move it to a more suitable section once we find out what the issue is.

I found your post interesting and had a quick search on Google, is this similar to your issue?..


superuser.com/questions/806984/recover-a-file-filled-with-zeroes-nuls-after-power-loss

I hope someone can atleast give you some answers

[IT Troll]

I take it your Movies folder is on your D: drive? In which case it sound like there is a problem with your RAID. What sort is it? See if you can get any health status from that or maybe try turning off write caching if it is enabled.

[majmattmason]

Yes, I did do a google search for both the symptoms and the symptoms of any possible viruses, but turned up nothing. All of my systems appear clean. I found a couple of files actually had pieces of other video in their place. Also, the RAID looks healthy.

After thinking about it a bit more, it's possible that Defrag could be the culprit. When the RAID was created, I used brand new drives. If Defrag moved the allocation tables to areas of the disk that had never been used before but neglected to move (or somehow lost) the actual data, that would account for the 0s. It would also account for a few files having clips from other videos instead of their own if it "moved" the file to a previously used area of the drive. I've turned off the scheduled Defrag (it had been set for every Wednesday at 1am) to see if that solves the issue.

[Oliver]

Jun 2, 2016 22:02:07 GMT majmattmason said:

Yes, I did do a google search for both the symptoms and the symptoms of any possible viruses, but turned up nothing. All of my systems appear clean. I found a couple of files actually had pieces of other video in their place. Also, the RAID looks healthy.

After thinking about it a bit more, it's possible that Defrag could be the culprit. When the RAID was created, I used brand new drives. If Defrag moved the allocation tables to areas of the disk that had never been used before but neglected to move (or somehow lost) the actual data, that would account for the 0s. It would also account for a few files having clips from other videos instead of their own if it "moved" the file to a previously used area of the drive. I've turned off the scheduled Defrag (it had been set for every Wednesday at 1am) to see if that solves the issue.

That sounds plausible, I'm going to be scared to defrag now. Could maybe the defrag process have been interrupted mid process somehow?

If you ran another defrag could that relocate the data to the correct places?