Files disappearing after transfer from one hdd to another

Hi guys,

This is my first post here but i have been reading this forum for a while so I know you guy will do your best to help, so thanks in advance.

I run a pc repair shop and have been having an issue where if I transfer files from any hard drive that is pugged into my desktop via sata to another hard drive also plugged into sata, the whole process of transfering finsihes but then after rebooting some or usually all of them have disappeared from the target drive. However if you were to check the available disk space it would appear that they are still on the drive. If i run chkdsk and repair errors the space is then freed up again and the files are still not there.

The reson I want to do it this way because I want to back up my customers files to my hard rive so I can reformat and reinstall windows on their laptops. The problem arrises when I want to transfer them back after reinstall. It only seems to occur when I put their hard drive back into the laptop and boot up. Once into windows the files are gone.

I cannot get my head around why this is happening. I have been using this method since windows xp all the way up to windows 8.1 and only seems to be happening on windows 10.

Really annoying as sometimes transfers can take 5 or 6 hours for it to then disappear. The only way i've found that works is if I copy the files from my desktop onto a usb hard drive then copy them from the usb hard drive to the laptop. Obviously this takes absolutely ages.

I should add that very occasionally it all works fine and there is no issue.
Any suggestions?

I understand that there is a new virus, ransomware, that deletes files. You may want to wipe the target drive clean by reformatting before copying, and be sure to do a virus scan on the source disk.

socklosk said:

I understand that there is a new virus, ransomware, that deletes files. You may want to wipe the target drive clean by reformatting before copying, and be sure to do a virus scan on the source disk.

Thanks for the response but as I mentioned in the above post, the whole reason I'm doing this is because I am reformatting the hard drive. Also its unlikely that 99% of my customers have the same ransomware. Pretty sure this is a windows 10 glitch as it only started happening to me immediately after installing windows 10. Already done fresh installs on my desktop to be sure and also gone back to windows 8.1 and it works fine on there. Really puzzling.

I ran into the same problem when I first started sharing files with Win10 from another drive -- and it kept happening until I disabled FastStartup in Win10. Apparently, Win10 was putting the shared drive into Hibernation when it was shutting down, and this caused all kinds of filesystem problems when I then accessed that shared drive from another OS.

Disable FastStartup and your filesystem problems should disappear.