my mate's work PC has crashed. runs XP, boots to the 'safety menu' but no matter which option you choose it just reboots and goes back to the menu.
apparently the boss was accidentally leaning on the shift key for a good few minutes while chatting to someone. it came up with the 'sticky keys' box and then locked up. he rebooted it, and then the problem started. he had been browsing a 'safe' web site just prior to this too.
ive taken the HDD out and put it in another machine as a secondary and browsed the drive. partitioned in two.
there's no obvious corruption - ive seen a corrupted HDD before and unfortunately it was mine. HOWEVER in the 'My Documents' folder of his D: drive, the directory structure is intact (ie different folders for his holiday snaps/family/etc), but all files are missing!?! other directories and the root directory seem ok.
ive done a scan with NAV2007 and no viruses on either partition.
on his drive C:, the Windows directory seems intact :confused: the only out of place thing i can see is that in the root directory of C: there is:
a directory called $WIN_NT$.~BT
and a file called $LDR$
which both seem to be something to do with recovery.
what the hell happened to his files then? it sounds like something malicious happened that all his images are gone, yet the directory structure to them is intact. its not as if someone or a program has deleted the whole directory, but gone into each one of fifty folders and cleared them out individually. or a HDD failure only affecting the My Documents area of the drive.
im going to try some file recovery software to see if theyre still on the drive somewhere, and then i'll do a scandisk.
my mate's work PC has crashed. runs XP, boots to the 'safety menu' but no matter which option you choose it just reboots and goes back to the menu.
apparently the boss was accidentally leaning on the shift key for a good few minutes while chatting to someone. it came up with the 'sticky keys' box and then locked up. he rebooted it, and then the problem started. he had been browsing a 'safe' web site just prior to this too.
ive taken the HDD out and put it in another machine as a secondary and browsed the drive. partitioned in two.
there's no obvious corruption - ive seen a corrupted HDD before and unfortunately it was mine. HOWEVER in the 'My Documents' folder of his D: drive, the directory structure is intact (ie different folders for his holiday snaps/family/etc), but all files are missing!?! other directories and the root directory seem ok.
ive done a scan with NAV2007 and no viruses on either partition.
on his drive C:, the Windows directory seems intact :confused: the only out of place thing i can see is that in the root directory of C: there is:
a directory called $WIN_NT$.~BT
and a file called $LDR$
which both seem to be something to do with recovery.
what the hell happened to his files then? it sounds like something malicious happened that all his images are gone, yet the directory structure to them is intact. its not as if someone or a program has deleted the whole directory, but gone into each one of fifty folders and cleared them out individually. or a HDD failure only affecting the My Documents area of the drive.
im going to try some file recovery software to see if theyre still on the drive somewhere, and then i'll do a scandisk.
straange and bizaaare