XP mystery

[moose119]

Hi all,

This is my first time here, so please bear with me Before I begin, let me also say that I am admittedly a novice at this stuff, so if you do have any advice for me, please try to use small words .. hehe .. Ok, here goes:

I discovered this morning that one of the subfolders in my music directory (D:\Winamp\Celtic) has been corrupted. About 50 albums worth of my mp3's have been replaced by oddly-named "folders" and "files". I am attaching a screenshot of that directory as an example.

These folders/files had no attibutes or properties, and could neither be moved nor deleted. I rebooted and ran a complete-system scan with Nortons 2002 (current as of 9/30) and also a full-system trojan scan with a scanner called TDS3, and both scans came up clean. I then rebooted again and ran a full scandisk on the D:\ drive, but it didn't give any errors-found report, just said it had finished.

After the scandisk, those folders/files were gone, along with a tremendous amount of my mp3's that were in that directory. I also noticed now that another folder that was in that same directory (D:\Winamp\Alternative-Grunge-Punk) has been changed to merely a "file" by that same name, with no extension or anything. That "file" used to be a folder that contained approximately 30 gb of mp3's, and it's now gone.

I'm at my wits' end here, so I'm ask you wise folks for your input/advice. Is my hard drive (160 gb Maxtor drive, only 3 months old, broken into 2 76-gb partitions) shot? Or do you think that the scandisk may have fixed whatever the problem was and I can just swallow my loss and just go about trying to replace the lost files?

Any help/advice you can offer is greatly appreciated.

Bill

[Cricket]

Hi moose119,

Did you install the WinXP SP-1 update?

Cricket

[moose119]

Hi Cricket,

No, I haven't installed SP-1 yet. I used Steve Gibson's fix to close up the url exploit thing in XP until I had a get a chance to install SP-1.

Bill

[morriswindgate]

It sounds like you got a virus, that not only infected the media files but also was able to spoof you norton av program. This type of stuff is going around on File sharing programs such as Kazaa and unlike virus infections that are spread by e-mail these pretend to be MP3 files that seem to be corrupted when you try and play them. The problem is that when you try to play them you execute the virus.
As to Service Pack 1, some people have had troubles installing it, but contrary to rumor it does not seek out your MP3 files and destroy them. I have 80 gigs of Music on one of my drives (My entire CD collection) and SP1 has not harmed them nor prevented me from burning them.

[moose119]

Hi morriswindgate,

I avoid Kazaa like the plague since it came bundled with spyware. I tossed those P2P programs out ages ago, long before I wiped my old ME and installed XP. I do download alot of music, but this happened from last night to this morning, and I haven't gotten any that seemed to be corrupt (to my knowledge).

I hadn't even run the ones I was downloading last night yet , cos they were still coming in when I lost my connection (isp was upgrading my cable lines so it dropped my downloads in the middle.)

So *if* it's some kind of virus, and it's possibly Norton-proof (that flushing you just heard was the sound of my subscription fee going down the toilet), now what?

Bill

[Nuclear Krusader]

You can do a check for virus at Housecall or Panda Software sites to see if they come up with anything.

housecall.antivirus.com
http://www.pandasoftware.com/ Click on the Active Scan link.

[moose119]

Thanks Nuclear Krusader,

Running the Housecall scan now on all 3 drives.

Bill

[moose119]

Ok,

In addition to the trojan scan and my Nortons AV 2002, I ran both the Housecall and the Panda ActiveScan virus scans on all 3 drives (C, D & E) and no virus was detected at all.

That leaves me with about 35 gb of missing files, and no thief yet.

The plot thickens ...

Bill