Can Total Commander cause data corruption on the disk?

[henno]

Is it imaginable that Total Commander could cause NTFS file system damage?

I removed SSD drive from the computer and put in another and installed Windows and required apps. All was working well.

To check some settings I swapped the disks and booted up the old Windows and while there, I attached the other SSD to the computer via USB and used Total Commander to copy over user's files to the new SSD (all appeared fine).

After the copying was finished, I re-swapped the disks but noticed that the 2 text files I had put on the desktop with Total Commander weren't there.
I attached the old SSD via USB and tried to copy over what's missing with the Skip All option. I got an error in TC that a directory was not created for some unexplained reason. Then I decided to clear all user data what was copied under the old Windows and do the copy again while the old drive was attached via USB. I got an error that one folder was not deleted -- access denied.

I figured it must be because I copied things over when I was in another windows installation and the NTFS SIDs were of the other Windows. Usually it is not a big deal to just blindly take over the ownership but not this time: it said I needed admin rights to read owner, even though I had clicked the button with a Windows shield icon in that window. I even tried to enable administrator account and logged in with that but no dice.

Then I restarted the computer, after that Windows 10 start menu stopped responding and right clicking it showed about 50% less options than usual. After that I decided to do another install. I copied the old SSD content (/Users/username folder) to a different PC using direct attached SATA with TC (no hiccups). Then I did clean install to that old SSD. All was fine. Then I attached the old SSD again to this PC and copied the data back with TC. All was fine. Then I put the old SSD back into user's laptop and booted it up and checked the folder where I had copied the data. But it was empty! How could it be empty? I copied over thousands of files 21GB in total and it took a long time to do that. Where have these files gone?

Later, when I searched files with Search Everything, I discovered some user data files at c:\found.000\...\ folder structure. This folder was hidden and marked as a system folder. Then I restarted the laptop and it did not come back to Windows. Instead I got blue screen and stop code: ntfs file system. Googling that tells me:

NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM

This stop code indicates the NTFS file system driver encountered a situation it could not handle, and is almost always caused by 3 things:

Data corruption on the disk
Data corruption in memory
The system completely running out of memory (this typically only happens on heavily-loaded servers)

After that I just used Windows file shares and Windows itself to copy user data over from the other PC. No problems then.

Can anyone comment what might have happened?

[Dalai]

Dying SSD? Bad RAM? Bad driver? There are quite a lot of possible reasons.

Regards
Dalai

[sqa_wizard]

I discovered some user data files at c:\found.000\...\ folder structure.

This files are generated by Windows (drive - properties - tools - error checking) which you have started manually.

... checked the folder where I had copied the data. But it was empty! How could it be empty? I copied over thousands of files 21GB in total and it took a long time to do that. Where have these files gone?

Caution, if you copy files from a running windows instance to a disk with a new windows instance and vice versa:

Do not enter any of those virtually linked folders like "Documents and Settings".
Doing this on the disk with the new windows instance, windows will fool you and open the folder on drive C instead, which is the one of your "running windows".

This will result in a copy on the same disk and you folder at new disk remains empty.

[MVV]

TC only uses public Windows API for accessing any kind of drives so it can damage any disks not more and not less than any other application.

But sqa_wizard have mentioned very realistic scenario caused by compatibility reparse points used in Windows user profile folders. These reparse points always contain full paths with drive letters and of course Windows is unable to understand that e.g. C:\Users should be resolved as X:\Users (where X: is your attached drive's letter),

Also you should be aware of a dangerous CopyLinks TC option which makes TC to copy reparse points as reparse points instead of recursively copying their contents (I've burnt some of my fingers on it and have disabled it finally).