[AccessD] Strange happenings (Rather OT, but Advice is appreciated)

Doug Murphy dw-murphy at cox.net
Tue Apr 24 21:01:59 CDT 2012


It could be a rootkit, or a hardware problem. Before spending a lot of time
on rebuilding on that drive I'd check it. According to Steve Gibson,
http://www.grc.com/intro.htm, it isn't unusual for drives to start losing
sectors. I am far from a hardware expert by any means, but drives are cheap
enough so why rebuild on one that might have problems.

-----Original Message-----
From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
[mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Darryl Collins
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 5:28 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
Subject: [AccessD] Strange happenings (Rather OT, but Advice is appreciated)

(xposted with Excel-L)

Wow...

I have a trusty HP desktop, which has worked flawlessly for about 4 years
now out of the box.  This machine is on for most of the day and night, most
days and nights. 

It is basically the family PC in the lounge room.  Last night I was at home
listening to music on iTunes thru the headphones when I noticed some of the
tracks in the list started to flag themselves as unavailable - What the???

Went to the desktop so I could check the folder and stacks of Icons are now
missing, - there were there not 10 mins ago. I check the folders - stacks of
files were missing.

I immediately shut down the whole system, rebooted and the icons and files
were still missing.  Ran a system restore which got back the programs and
their icons, but gobs of data had been deleted.

Luckily I have pretty good backups of my data, and I have also found some
software that seems to be able to restore most (if not all of the) deleted
data from the existing drive.

My question is WTF happened.  It was almost like one of those virus's from
the mid 90's that kids used to write - You know "Delete all jpgs and mp3".

Actually it was wiping a whole stack of stuff.

I am pretty tempted to wipe the drive and reinstall from scratch.  First I
will see if I can recover the system.
It is weird.  Bookmarks from the brower, shortcut buttons etc were also all
wiped.

Never seen anything like it...  
Anyone got any suggestions?

Cheers
Darryl.

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