I am reaching out to the W users for some answers because I am searching for an answer. Ok....Friday night at about 2:30AM my computer restarted for no reason. And when I woke up I found all of my icons on the desktop gone except for "Computer" and "Recycle Bin". I clicked on the Start button and no programs at all showed up. Hmmm. I restarted in safe mode and had the same problem. Somehow a friend backed up the computer a couple of days and everything is fine except....all of my pictures, movies, videos, and music is all gone. Everything else returned except for those C:/ files (Files are there just nothing when I click them) Had about 2GB songs, 20GB movies, 700MB Videos, and 17GB songs
Here's the weird part (as if that wasn't enough). I clicked on Itunes and ran some songs, just to see how many exclamation points I would get for a file missing...and the songs played. The filename for songs listed pointed to my C:/Music file but....nothing is in there. This gives me hope that all of those files that were there on Friday are not all lost.
I would appreciate any help or answers (even if they are blatantly obvious ones)
Relevant information: Windows Vista I have done a disk check (clean) Was running Avast anti-virus but deleted it because i think it gave me a problem in the first place (actually looking for a new one) I tried a System Restore for an earlier date to see if that would help and all those files were still missing. So I undid it. My friend thinks my hard drive is failing and the next step is to try to take it out and put in something else to see. I just refuse to believe that all those files just...disappeared. Thanks.
2009-10 Fantasy Football Champion (Wienerville Sloppy Seconds)
2009-10 Fantasy Football Champion (Wienerville War Room)
And when I woke up I found all of my icons on the desktop gone except for "Computer" and "Recycle Bin".
I clicked on Itunes and ran some songs, just to see how many exclamation points I would get for a file missing...and the songs played. The filename for songs listed pointed to my C:/Music file but....nothing is in there. This gives me hope that all of those files that were there on Friday are not all lost.
Could it be possible you've logged into a new/different user profile? Or the old one was corrupted and it kicked you in a new one?
Somewhat of a success. Quick google search of "corrupted user profile" leads to "copying to a new profile" And I checked "hidden files and folders". And there they are!! Now to figure out how to make them "unhidden." Thanks a ton!!
2009-10 Fantasy Football Champion (Wienerville Sloppy Seconds)
2009-10 Fantasy Football Champion (Wienerville War Room)
That definitely sounds like malware. If you can, I'd log in to safe mode with an admin account (different from the account you normally log in on) and run Combofix (bleepingcomputer.com). And pray that it does the job. The stuff we've been seeing at work lately has been nasty enough that I've been throwing those cases at the other engineers...
You might want to look in your processes now and see if Internet explorer is randomly starting in the background. This sounds like the alureant rootweb malware that I fought off a few weeks back. Make sure IE is closed, open task manager and look for iexplore.com to be running in processes. If it isn't, wait a while (15 min will do) and check again.
If it is, you want Malwarebytes (you want it anyway) and AVG free. Full scan with malware bytes in safe mode, then the same with AVG free. Norton and Avast were not able to kill the problem. I also had good luck with finding it with Microsoft Malicious software removal program.
We'll be back right after order has been restored here in the Omni Center.
That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy - Swift