90GB gone... disappeared... vamoosed

Hello all,

I just recently awoke to a nice surprise 90GB of stuff on my computer just up and vanished!

I got up this morning, and noticed that my desktop only had about half the icons on it that it should have had. Puzzled, and a little panicky, I go into my main storage folder and find that there are only 2 sub-folders left (out of 11)!!

But, the weird thing is, is that my computer seems fine. I'm running a few virus scans as we speak to check, but, I mean, nothing important is missing. All that's missing (I find this to be the weird part) are my gaming stuff. Like, my PSP ISOs (60GB), PSXPSP eboots (~20GB), and a couple of torrents and my torrent files (~10GB).

Suffice it to say, I'm confused. I mean, I'm relieved nothing important is missing, but, this still sucks. Getting some of those games back is going to kill my ratio on some torrent sites, for sure P

Just finished my scans, and nothing was found. Anybody got any ideas? Hackers? Somnambulists? ANYthing?!

Ugh... thanks for any help, though.

It was the police.

Yeah, t3h f3ds pwned joo!

Seriously though, it wouldn't surprise me if one day the RIAA/MPAA/BSA/NYPDBLUEPDQASAP plant some trojan decoys on the torrent sites that just wipe out peoples' P2P stashes.

Not with a TrueCrypt drive http//forum.freeipodguide.com/smilies_mod/upload/3c830d703c2cada348106fffc2cf3c49.gif[" alt=""/img5ad0678cb6]

@OP Was it all on a separate partition? Does someone else have access to your computer?

SpinRite may be able to help you out

give it a try

It was all on my C drive. I had a bunch more ISOs and such on my D partition, but they never got touched.

And yeah, someone else has access to my computer, but, it's my girlfriend, and some of her schoolwork got deleted as well, so she's not a suspect.

I just don't know what happened, probably won't. I reformatted.

that is reaally weird.. no one was playing a prank on you?

I'm almost certain it was an explicit act, whether intentional or not. Random data corruption doesn't happen that cleanly, such that only certain files & directories are neatly pruned while leaving other data untouched.

Somebody, whether you or your GF by accident, or somebody else with intent, deleted that data. I'm reasonably convinced of it. Accidental deletes happen to everyone at some time or another, and yes it has happened to me before. Especially back in the old command-line days when you had no user account permissions and no recycle bin -- back in the Win95 days I watched one guy at a DOS prompt trying to delete the contents of a folder (DELTREE li.li). Unfortunately he was sitting at the C\ root directory at the time. As soon as he hit the Enter key and answered 'Y' to the confirmation prompt, he realized and let out a yell. Oops.

Another common thing to do in Windows Explorer that makes your heart skip a beat until you realize what happened, is that your mouse finger hesitates a bit too long on the button when moving the mouse, and you drag a folder into an adjacent folder. Making it look like you deleted it. I used to panic the first few times, but it has happened often enough that I now catch my breath and calmly move it back out of the erroneous folder.

^ Have you tried searching for the files? 90GB is a lot to accidentally move and not notice, but it's a small possibility. Also, could it be that ever "helpful" windows program that puts all your unused desktop files in a folder by itself?

When you look at the available space on your drives does it show that the drive still has data on it? I had run into a similar incident where i was missing some folder, and it ended up somehow they had turned to hidden. So when i checked "view hidded folders or files" i was able to see it.......worth a shot at least........otherwise,,,, get OnTrack;)

No, no, it was gone. I said I had an extra 90GB of free space, meaning it was deleted, not just moved.

I tried to use some of the recovery tools on Hiren's BootCD, but could only manage to find some pictures, and nothing worth recovering, so I reformatted, since my HD was pretty much clear at the time.

A friend of mine seems to think that I had a time-bomb virus. I mean, the timing was pretty good Halloween evening, I lose 90GB of my files. I'll admit that I know next-to-Jack about viruses, but I thought it a little bit of a stretch that the virus would do that. I mean, couldn't I have just changed my clock thingy to 10 years in the past so it would never activate?

Regardless, the damage is done. I had to go and download Super Mario Galaxy again, among others... >_<

For future reference, should you ever have files deleted (accidentally or otherwise) that you want to recover, immediately cease writing files to the drive and run an undelete utility. The free Recuva[=http//www.recuva.com/]Recuva tool for example, or something from Ultimate Boot CD, whatever. Or one of the more professional recovery packages like OnTrack.

Writing to the disk after a delete runs the risk of overwriting the area of disk where the file contents were stored. so it's crucial that you attempt a restore ASAP before much heavy PC use. In super critical cases, I've shutdown the PC immediately, removed the drive, and slaved it in another PC where I ran the undelete utility on the slave. Even if you aren't consciously saving files to the drive, the OS is constantly making small writes to the registry, virtual memory, temp files, etc., so as time passes your chances for success diminish greatly, especially if your drive is near full.