Computer problems - Urgent technical assistance needed!!!

[Yoono]

I NEED HELP!!!

The problem started early morning yesterday when I opened my hardrive. The folders are showing weird names in symbols which indicate encoding errors. The data within those folders are disappearing 15 folders at a time (this morning the entire hardrive was compromised, and 4 years of my collection and data are lost). I tried to let the computer scan the problem but it made things worse. It reported that the files were missing and that the procedure has been truncated. I tried opening one of the affected files and it says:

D:(unknown) is not accessible. The filename, directory nam, or volume label syntax is incorrect.

I tried opening another folder and it says this message:

D:(unknown) refers to a location that is unavailable. It could be on a hard drive on this computer, or in a network. Check to make sure that the disk is properly inserted, or that you are connected to the Internet or your network, and then try again. If it still cannot be located, the information might have been moved to a different location.

The data was not in a network, I checked it several times, no disk was required, and I was connected to the internet. I tried searching for the missing files/data but it didn’t work, and I fear if I continue checking this on my own it will continue to degrade itself: I even fear the problem may spread to another hardrive.

This never happened to me before and to think it could do this at a bad time - really stupid. Stupid enough for me to give up using a computer if there’s no solution to this problem. If any technical experts are reading this case, please help and help soon because I can never know what bull-s!*t my computer will do next.

[Darkstar]

Sounds to me like you’ve been infected by a very nasty virus.

I’d suggest you take the computer, drive and all, into a service shop. Tell them how your machine has started losing directories, and and all the rest you posted here. They may know how to fix/clean it. Before they do anything to your drive, make sure you understand what it is they will do. If they don’t know what it is, they’ll tell you they have to reformat the drive, and that means you’d lose the data on the bad drive.

If the data on the drive is MUST HAVE, then it can be recovered— but it is costly to do so. My father lost his work drive to something very similar, and it cost him over $900 to get his hard drive’s contents recovered (copied to another drive). And prices have just gone up since then. You need to look into Data Recovery Services for that.

[OrcAttack]

See the post in the O/T forum. Double posting doesn’t help. Narg’s answer there was pretty good.

[Darkstar]

Yes, Narg’s answer was very good. I didn’t see that, or I wouldn’t have answered here other then “Narg answered this in the OT forums”.