Date: 02/09/06 (Computer Help)    Keywords: virus, antivirus, web, spyware

i have been having problems with my computer for a few weeks. It started out by me just assuming i had been infected by a virus. i have 3 hard drives (2 maxtor 200gb and one Wetern Digital 160gb) and was assured that reformatting my c drive would not effect my other hard drives. Of course i attempted to virus scan it and search for any spyware and nothing really showed up. the drive was constantly freezing up and taking a very long time to open folders, as well as not allowing me to move files from it to other drives. i ran this error checking program that is located under the drive's properties under the tab Tools, rebooted, and this found multiple bad sectors and attempted to fix them with no real improvement in performance.


so i reformatted,. when it was done reformatting the screen that i had seen during the disk error check came back up (during a reboot) and it started to recover orphaned files that appeared to be all the files from my other 2 drives.

so began the insanity. my 2nd hard drive is all avi files and mp3s files. i first noticed folders missing. then when i would try to view some of these files instead of an avi file playing an mp3 would play, sometimes it would be a mesh of many mp3s that would play and other times it would be a completely different avi file that would skip along and barely play. then in the mp3 files i would click on an mp3 by a certian band yet a completely different song would play and even then it was an odd part of a song, not the entire thing. the more i look the more i find this happening in this drive.

in the 3rd hard drive after the formatting some of the files because incomplete all these files were rar, par2, iso, and vob files, there was such a high volume of these that i am not exactly sure how many if any completely disappeared. and in reality i wasn't really concerned with losing the data from this drive.

even now when i have to reboot, sometimes it just automattically enters into checking my drives for disk errors and it will tell me its recovering orphaned files and it will continue to find bad sectors on all my drives and tell me its fixing them.

lately (the past few days) opening up a folder with avi files dramatically slows my compter down, it takes forever to read just the details of the files, it takes even longer for me to get one of the files to play. Also when i try to play it and freezes it up the window will shut down and my taskbar will dissapear until i open my dvd drive and then the task bar comes back.

so with my limited computer knowledge i assumed that maybe the drive was going bad. i dled a program that will check your hd and it said everything looked good (i tried to dl the maxtor program to do this, but it required that you have a drive - and i don't). so i decided that i would reformat my other 2 drives, i moved all the files from my 2nd drive to the other 2, and during this my computer told me that there was a corrupt file on my 3rd drive located in the hidden recycler folder it starts out "S-1-5-21-then a long string of numbers" of course i can not delete this file. i continued to just move the files off my 2nd drive.

Now that there are no files on my 2nd drive, it still tells me that 20 gigs of that drive is being used, but i have no idea what it is being used by, i checked thru dos - nothing, i have hidden files showing - nothing. and now i afraid to reformat without first finding out what is taking up 20 gigs.

so is this a virus that has effected all of my drives? could this be caused by my drives perhaps overheating? could this be because i didn't set up my drives after reformatting with the Maxtor disc? my os is xp home with service pack 2. i use norton antivirus, and it updates automatically, for spyware i use ccleaner, adaware, and spybot s&d. I dl a lot of stuff, all the stuff i dl is rar and par2 files from usenet, or avi files thru bitttorrent. i don't have the slightly idea what is going on. besides updating and running my virus scan 10000s of times i have also run some online virus scans from symatec website, and bitdefender - nothing was found.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/584403.html