adrian bailey

Thanks for replying so promptly. You're right about backups, of course. I
was scared to even turn the laptop on when it was infected (still less go
online), so it's ironic that now I thought it was safe to start using it
again (and the first thing I knew I had to do was back up any precious data)
something like this hits me.

Hunting around the Net to find other people's experiences, it seems that
people have been able to find their removed files in, for example,
"FOUND.nnn" folders. There are some of those folders on my C drive, a couple
of them quite large, but none dated today. And the problem itself may be a
disk (hardware) problem, rather than a virus problem.

I'm pleased that I stopped the consistency check, instead of letting it
trash everything, but I wonder whether maybe my switching the machine off
has prevented the formation of a "FOUND.nnn" folder for the files that were
removed?

Adrian

pegasus \(mvp\)

See below.

"Found.nn" folders are the result of people running chkdsk.exe. The
files inside are generally considered useless. I do not recommend that
you run chkdsk.

tony

For future reference,

NEVER swtich a amchine off WHILE the hard drive is being checked for errors. You almost
guarantee that you will make things much, much worse.

adrian bailey

Are you seriously suggesting that if your machine was telling you that it
was trashing your D drive, you'd let it carry on?

Adrian

pegasus \(mvp\)

When it tells you that it's thrashing drive D: then it's already too late
to do anything about it.