Copy succeeded - or did it?!

You would think in this day and age that these things wouldn’t happen...

I have a 3.5” HD connected to my laptop via one of those USB things. I was backing up my wedding videos onto it when it spun down for no apparent reason and spun back up. Windows didn’t give any sign of a problem, but I was suspicious.

Event viewer showed a warning (*not* an error), whose text was “An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation.”

After the copy operation completed “successfully”, I ran a binary comparison on the file that was being transferred during the blip, and lo and behold, the files are different! It astounds me that kind of data corruption can happen (with an event logged to boot!) and Windows just continues on regardless, with no indication to the user that their data is now fubar.

Flabbergasted!