Darryl Collins
darryl at whittleconsulting.com.au
Sun Apr 29 18:21:27 CDT 2012
Thanks Guys, Agreed, it doesn't seem to be either disk failure or virus attack based on the tests I have done. And so far the brute is running beautifully again and is just purring along nicely as before. But like having an unfaithful girlfriend I am trying to be believe all will be good again, but deep done I am still distrustful. Now... Jim, I am very curious about your local electrical issues angle. This is a contender for sure - the area I live in is oddly '2nd world power supply' quality from time to time - especially during stormy weather - I have a basic surge protector, but perhaps something with more grunt and UPS maybe in order here. Either way I am curious about this - I have heard about folks having this sort of thing (and there is plenty on Google about "The computer eat my files"), but never experienced - or in this case, witnessed it. I actually saw the files starting to be flagged as missing from iTunes as it was playing tracks. Freaky!! Cheers Darryl. -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Jim Lawrence Sent: Saturday, 28 April 2012 12:31 PM To: 'Access Developers discussion and problem solving' Subject: Re: [AccessD] Strange happenings (Rather OT, but Advice is appreciated) Hi Darryl: It seems doubtful that it was a viral type attack that ravished your system. Even virus attacks will follow some sort of logical pattern. Now a days the most powerful malware just attempts gain control of your system or capture some importance personal data. It would seem you are having a bit of hardware failure. Most times the problems are related to hard drive failure but it can just as well be hard drive control or even a motherboard failures. These type of issues are usually initiated by local electrically problems, low power, lightning storms and so on...learned from experience. Using a quality UPS/surge protector can not be over-stated. IOW, your hardware is most likely failing and it might be a good time to replace some or all of your computer equipment before re-installing the software and data. (There are a number of free and open source pieces of hardware checking software out there if you wish to narrow down the problem.) HTH Jim -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Darryl Collins Sent: Friday, April 27, 2012 4:25 PM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] Strange happenings (Rather OT,but Advice is appreciated) Well, the story so far, between having a decent backup on a portable drive (of my documents and files at least), file recovery software and a few other nuts and bolt I have managed to get the PC back to close to the original condition. Lost the bookmarks from Mozilla, stored passwords and other profile info - my fault for not backing that up - but in the scheme of things it all recoverable over time, beside, the bookmark list was getting out of hand and needed a clean up anyway :) I have run some full disk scans and tests, full virus and rootkit scans as well. Nothing has come up on those. For the moment I am going to update the scope (a few more app data files and the mozilla profiles for example) and frequency of the backups from this PC from weekly to daily. If I get a repeat performance of this I will completely wipe the drive and see what happens. Right now I am just thankful that I am experienced and patient enough to take regular backups of my data - Seriously, if I had not I would have lost pretty much all my personal files in this instance. The software recovery is useful, but it cannot get back all the files intact - plenty of them were just shells with corrupt data in them. Darryl Collins Whittle Consulting Pty Ltd Suite 8, 660 Canterbury Rd Surrey Hills, VIC, 3127 p: +61 3 9898 3242 m: +61 418 381 548 f: +61 3 9898 1855 e: darryl at whittleconsulting.com.au w: www.whittleconsulting.com.au ________________________________________ From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] on behalf of Darryl Collins [darryl at whittleconsulting.com.au] Sent: Wednesday, 25 April 2012 10:28 AM 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. -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com