What happened with my hard drive? (Is it failing?)

DarkEnergy · September 27, 2016

Edit: Earlier I said it seemed to be working fine. Just now as I was copying stuff off of the hard drive onto another just in case, it stopped copying. Nothing opens from it now

Edit 2: It must be an on and off thing. A couple restart later and it reappears and is working.

Running Windows 10

Here's what happened. I had just finished installing linux mint in vmware. The vmware files always go on my 1tb HDD. In mint, I noticed that it wasn't auto adjusting to my screen resolution so I tried installing vmware tools. I'm a noob at that so that wasn't working. In mint, I went to the drivers application. I noticed there was an option to enable some sort of firmware for amd systems. (My computer A.K.A the host has an amd processor). I clicked it and told it to apply. Well after some time, vmware spat out an error "the file specified is not a virtual disk" and the vm just closed out of itself. No matter what I could not start mint back up as it kept giving me the error. I figured that something went wrong with the vm disk so I tried deleting it from the HDD. That went fine except it gave a few errors halfway through. I went to try and start Windows 10 in a vmware and I had the same error "the file specified is not a virtual disk". I started getting worried. I went through my HDD and clicked on a song to make sure it's just a vmware thing. The song wouldn't open. In fact all of the thumbnails of everything on the HDD were there but nothing would open, no pictures, music, videos, programs, you name it. I restarted my computer. After booting back up my HDD was missing. It wasn't in explorer and it wasn't in disk management. All of my programs that run off of that hard drive failed to load. I'm starting to shit myself. I restart one more time. (The computer was acting funny when I told it to restart). After ANOTHER restart the HDD is back and working like normal. Everything runs fine and opens fine.

What happened? Anything I do inside of a virtual machine should not have effected my computer outside of it. Was what happened just a coincidence? Is my HDD failing?

In Event viewer it showed a lot of new "Warning" labels under "System". When I mean a lot I mean 14,735 new warning events. The two common events were: