Funny you say that, my Toshiba 500GB actually did get corrupted around the r298 mark. I freaked out when it happened beacause it was fuckin weird! I wish I took a screenshot of the files but a shit-ton of files got added to the root directory, none of them were of any use to anything and all the file names got changed to wingdings characters. I formatted the drive (Not quick) and copied everything over from my backup's and all is well however I seem to have a couple of files in my GC save folder that I can't shift for love nor money:
View attachment 15949
Didn't want to mention it as I got it sorted but still, here it is. My root had all these sorts of files....
EDIT: Come to think of it, those files may have made it there when I had the r297-r301 issue. Anyhoo