ID:51644
 
Can the installation of a DVD-ROM drive wipe a hard drive? Last night I almost drew that conclusion after my secondary hard drive seemingly dumped all of its data (298GB of 299 free it says).

However, programs like PC Inspector File Recovery showed that "clusters" of data could be recovered. The problem is that I have no idea what these files are until (and sometimes even after) I attempt to open them.

This leads me to wonder if something I once read about called symbolic links could be responsible. My question is--How do I restore my symbolic links? Or can I? (Or worse, is this unrelated?)
It would be unrelated. I put in and take out drives all the time from my machine. I'd run a checkdisk to see if the drive became damaged somehow.
Symbolic links also typically contain no partition-specific data.
Jerico2day wrote:
It would be unrelated. I put in and take out drives all the time from my machine. I'd run a checkdisk to see if the drive became damaged somehow.

I did that, but the check reported no errors and said the harddrive was running fine. However, my computer was slightly louder than usual for a short bit last night, and I wonder if that could be related. I noticed data corruption in 1 file and 1 file only about a week ago, and now this happened.
Yep, could be on the way out, I'd stop using that drive, honestly. A new one on newegg.com would run you about 60 bucks for that size.

As for restoring the drive, I've never tried, so I don't have any good advice there. Good luck.