The whole story: Hi people, please help me. I feeling at a loss because i think i’ve just lost 100 GB of data from my hard disk due to a strange virus. Few days ago i opened adobe photoshop and 2 error windows poped up both saying something about windows/system32/xxx.dll file. I think one of them was twain.dll or smth. I just pressed ok to both boxes and continue. Then later when i wanted to save my work to the desktop, i find out that there were about 10 new folders and another 10 unidentified files on my desktop! This really shocked me. The folders are empty. And both the folders and the unidentified files have un-readable filenames. When i right click properties it shows that they take 0 bytes space.
After i saw all these strange files i had enough so i decided to restart the computer. Then i got stucked at that boot screen? I don’t know what it’s called that black screen. After it checks the master and slave drive things, i go to this black screen. There is a cursor at the top blinking and then it goes down one line and continues blinking. After that it just get stucked there everytime. I can’t even enter Windows.
So i decide to install windows xp to another hard drive i got. A seagate 80GB ide hard drive. After i installed windows xp to this drive, i tried to connect the 200GB hard drive (F: drive -> the one which won’t startup/with the virus/with all the files) to this 80GB (C: Drive) thinking i can simply transfer my files over. I was wrong. It turns out the 200GB hard drive only had 3 folders left! And all of them can be opened except the Windows one.
- F:\Windows
- F:\Documents and Settings
- F:\Program files
- F:\CanonMP (hidden) -> printer folder
Avast antivirus scan
I used to have a folder “F:\Everything” which, yes -_-, i put everything in. It has now dissapeared. So i assume its gone. However, the strange folders and files were still there. And these unidentified files are so huge in size! They are 1-3 GB each! Just those 10 files or so take up 47GB! Then i immediately checked my F: drive space. My 200GB(186GB) hard drive only had 770MB left!
I think the aim of this virus is to bombard the computer with huge files to fill up the whole hard drive and maybe erase existing files in the process.
I restarted my computer and they demand to check for the consistency of the F: drive. Check disk marks all the system32 files as invalid. For eg. “the size of /windows/system32/xxx.dll entry is not valid” or “/windows/system32/xxx.dll entry contains a nonvalid link.” Now check disk is still running after 2 hours. I has been showing “Bad links in lost chain at cluster XXXXXX corrected” for more than an hour. It is now at “Bad links in lost chain at cluster 381598 corrected” as i’m writing and it keeps on running.
Should i stop running this check disk? If no, how long will it take?
Most importantly, can i still recover the lost data in the hard drive?
Any help will be very much appreciated, thank you.
Sign In
Create Account
