Virus busted me!

Piriform community,

Today I was dumb enough to download a virus on to my PC. It completely wiped all but the most basic files and programs. I formatted the drive and reinstalled everything, thinking my external hard drive would be unharmed. It turns out it isn't unharmed, and all of my files on there have also disappeared, including some essays I had ready to hand in : (.

There is something peculiar though. When I plug in my external drive and go to "My Computer", the disk capacity preview still indicates that there are files left on there. This led me to believe that there must be a way to get them back.

My question is this - I've never used something like Recuva before, and I have no computer whizz friends. How would I go about recovering the files which "seem" to have been deleted on the external drive?

Thanks,

Scott

Hi, hiirscotty. Welcome. :D Sorry for your troubles.

Somebody on this forum will be able to help you...unfortunately it isn't me, others have much more expertise.

I will say, though, don't write to the drive where you think the files are until one of the more knowledgeable members chimes in.

Writing to the drive creates the possibility that something you want to keep might get overwritten.

Hi there! and thanks for the welcome.

I've managed to fix this problem now. I had a little look around, and found that the files on the external were simply hidden. ha! all I had to do was un-hide them!

Still, contracting a virus hasn't been a total mess. It's a good excuse to join this community. Maybe I can learn a few things - loving Piriform products!

Thanks,

Scott

Good to hear you got it fixed. Look forward to seeing you here. Folks here are pretty knowledgeable, pretty helpful.

Glad to hear you found your hidden files hiirscotty.

Now about the virus, I know you formatted etc but you never know. Go here and follow the simple steps, then post the logs in the Spyware hell area of the forum and our spyware mod will check things for you.

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=20120

I have no experience with malware, but :-

Your virus did something bad, and after "cleaning" your system you could not see files on the external drive.

I suggest the external files may have been inaccessible because :-

1) Those files were "owned" by the "old you" and the system naturally protected them from the "new you" ;

2) They simply suffered "collateral damage" when the virus was attacking the system ;

3) They virus concealed copies of itself on all other drives so that it can come back and haunt you.

n.b. an infected external drive is a good way to share infection around a community.