Hard drive error/failure

[Soma]

So I've had this hard drive for about a month. It's partitioned into 2 pieces. 50 gigs for windows © and the rest is just storage (D). Last night i noticed that about half my stuff on the D drive was missing, music movies stuff like that. I did a check disk scan, Right click the drive, under tools or whatever. Then today i wakeup and everything on that drive is gone yet 350/416 gigs free but when i click on the drive there are no folders or anything on it. So i figured i would just suck it up and reformat everything. What scares me is that this could happen again in the future. That it's not a user error and the HDD is defective. I can't return the drive to newegg because it's passed 30 days. What do you suggest I do?

[HalcyonSpirit]

Try running this on the drive. It might come up with some errors, which typically means there are bad sectors on it. I've never used it extensively, so I don't know everything it can and can't do, but it's a start.

[Argitoth]

***ALWAYS*** make backups on two harddrives. Matter of fact, I have two harddrives and I use both to store different things, but all the important files are totally redundant with the help up Pathsync.

easiest (and free) backup utility: http://www.cockos.com/pathsync/

[Tricklozen]

Try running this on the drive. It might come up with some errors, which typically means there are bad sectors on it. I've never used it extensively, so I don't know everything it can and can't do, but it's a start.

Yes. SMART is smart. Your BIOS may not read, or have not been configured to read the SMART statistics. In that case, use a utility like this to figure out whether the harddisk has recorded any errors, and whether it should be replaced.

So I've had this hard drive for about a month. It's partitioned into 2 pieces. 50 gigs for windows © and the rest is just storage (D). Last night i noticed that about half my stuff on the D drive was missing, music movies stuff like that. I did a check disk scan, Right click the drive, under tools or whatever. Then today i wakeup and everything on that drive is gone yet 350/416 gigs free but when i click on the drive there are no folders or anything on it. So i figured i would just suck it up and reformat everything. What scares me is that this could happen again in the future. That it's not a user error and the HDD is defective. I can't return the drive to newegg because it's passed 30 days. What do you suggest I do?

You could have tried chkdsk d: /r (five stages, deeper recovery method), but if you've already formatted the harddisk, it's too late.

[Soma]

I'll try the chkdsk d: /r ( and the other things as well. I haven't reformatted it yet. Newegg said they would replace it, so I'm just going to try to see if i can retrieve anything off of it before i start anew.