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Mystery Data Loss
Silent Tristero
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
One of my two HDD's seems to have emptied itself, for want of a better term.
Nothing out of the ordinary happening, I went to launch something and the .exe was missing - I look at the drive and it's completely empty apart from one folder.
This is a 320gb WD drive that did contain all of my music, games and their save files. The folder that's mysteriously left over contains some videos and music, stuff I haven't organised yet. A separate 80Gb drive contains my Windows 7 install, and is fine as far as I can tell.
Something like 100Gb has vanished, in a relatively short space of time; I was listening to music and playing a game a few hours ago tops.
The only thing I was doing on the PC before I realised, was cleaning up the Startup files in MSConfig, but I've undone all the changes I made (Which were only to software that I didn't want starting up). I also uninstalled some software; the beta files for SW:TOR and SWAT 4, for the sake of accuracy.
I'm completely stumped. Where did 100+ Gb's of data go, in the space of like 90 minutes? It's literally clean apart from that one folder, no empty folders etc.
There are also no system restore points for that drive, but if I'm right then that wouldn't help recover files anyway.
Help? Recovering the stuff seems impossible, since it's literally not present on the system any more, but I need to know why this happened. Running an Avira scan right now, but I'm not exactly a careless user/browser of the web.
Nothing out of the ordinary happening, I went to launch something and the .exe was missing - I look at the drive and it's completely empty apart from one folder.
This is a 320gb WD drive that did contain all of my music, games and their save files. The folder that's mysteriously left over contains some videos and music, stuff I haven't organised yet. A separate 80Gb drive contains my Windows 7 install, and is fine as far as I can tell.
Something like 100Gb has vanished, in a relatively short space of time; I was listening to music and playing a game a few hours ago tops.
The only thing I was doing on the PC before I realised, was cleaning up the Startup files in MSConfig, but I've undone all the changes I made (Which were only to software that I didn't want starting up). I also uninstalled some software; the beta files for SW:TOR and SWAT 4, for the sake of accuracy.
I'm completely stumped. Where did 100+ Gb's of data go, in the space of like 90 minutes? It's literally clean apart from that one folder, no empty folders etc.
There are also no system restore points for that drive, but if I'm right then that wouldn't help recover files anyway.
Help? Recovering the stuff seems impossible, since it's literally not present on the system any more, but I need to know why this happened. Running an Avira scan right now, but I'm not exactly a careless user/browser of the web.
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Edit: Fully scanned, surprisingly detected some malware, but nothing's changed. Checked all 'Hidden Folder' options, no luck.
Edit #2: Tried some software, 'Power Data Recovery', and it confirms that the files have been deleted by something.
Don't recognise a bunch of that stuff, though. Waiting for some advice before I attempt to restore it.