System : Windows XP Pro SP3
Hard disk drive : 2 x Western Digital "Blue" 640GB in RAID1 array (mirrored), NVidia controler (from the motherboard)
Partition type : NTFS with 4KB clusters
Hi,
I use the excellent software SynchronizeIt (http://www.grigsoft.com/wndsync.htm) for most of my file copy operations, since it's one of the very few tools on Windows which keeps ALL timestamps, including creation/modification dates of directories (Robocopy is the only other one I know of, with the "/DCOPY:T" parameter, but until very recently I wasn't aware of this option, which only works with XP026 version and newer – XP026 is included in Windows Vista but works on WinXP, this is not the case for version XP027 though).
But I noticed a weird case of file corruption : sometimes all the files in a folder are corrupted in a similar way (it's easy to see with pictures). I searched a link between the files causing that issue and found out that they were all downloaded with a download manager software, namely FlashGet or Orbit Downloader (NetTransport, which is very similar, doesn't seem to cause this issue). When I looked inside the corrupted files, I discovered that, for all of them, the 25 first kilobytes were copied, then the rest of the file was filled with zeros (resulting in the same file size). I've asked the author of SynchronizeIt if he could figure out why, but he apparently had no clue. He suggested me to use various options, but none worked, I still had failed copies with those particular files. The copy with Windows Explorer works fine. When I cut and paste such files with Explorer to another partition, then move them back to the original partition, and then copy them with SynchronizeIt, the copy is flawless. I had to use the (also excellent) data recovery software GetDataBack, and strangely, it recovered all files on the partition, except in those problematic folders, BUT with a different behaviour : it recovered flawlessly about 5-10% of the files (like 3 pictures in a folder of 20), and skipped the others. I thought that it could be related to my data partition being excessively fragmented, which in combination to the way the download managers write files in small packets (it's supposed to optimize the speed) could result in such corruption, but defragmenting the folder doesn't change the outcome.
So, could anyone propose a plausible explanation to this phenonenon ? Could it be related to the RAID configuration ? And is there any way to quickly find and fix all those seemingly badly written files ? Otherwise, I plan to copy the whole partition on a backup hard drive with SynchronizeIt, then compare all directories with WinMerge, then cut and paste the source files generating a corrupted copy to another partition, then move them back (and in most cases I'll also have to use another software to reset the modification date of the folder), which will be quite time-consuming.
Thanks,
Gabriel (France)
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