Files missing, can't make sense of it.

blargs

Distinguished
Jan 21, 2009
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18,510
Good morning everyone,

Wondering if anyone has ever seen/experienced this problem. I had a 2 TB HD in my PC that ran over to my Patriot Box Office to play media on my TV. I've recently noticed that about half the media on this drive has been erased. All my music (two different folders), and about half of my movies are all gone. I originally suspected either my wife deleting the files herself (we're having some problems and she can be quite spiteful) or that she had given one of her friends access to my PC and they did the dirty work. Other than that, only one significant event stands out in my mind. Last week I removed all the RAM then returned all the sticks to the motherboard later in the evening. In my head this made no sense for removing/replacing RAM to affect a HD, but that is the one significant event I can think of, other than a single power bump. And even if this did have an effect, why only delete about half of the data on the drive?

Also, I have ran some file recovery software and salvaged about 20 songs and 10 movies. Makes me wonder just how much may have been available to recover anyways, aka, the files weren't deleted per say.

Weird question I know, but any help is appreciated. Thank you.
 

MrBig55

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Jun 27, 2011
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18,810
Other than confronting your wife, do you use an antivirus? Is it updated?

This looks like a malware treat to my eyes. You should always use "Spybot Search & Destroy" to immunize your computer vs malware treats, and do a scan with it and remove everything it finds. Malware can do anything, from preventing you to surf the net, to deleting files and deactivating antivirus...

Then if neither antivirus nor spybot does find anything, then maybe confront the lady ^^. Oh you could always make another partition and encrypt it, so that it does not appear at all it the correct password is not entered. That would protect these files from any poeple and any viruses as well.

Spybot S&D:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Encrypt a partition using TrueCrypt:
http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads
 

infomonkey

Distinguished
Oct 16, 2011
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18,510
Yes, I'm just beginning to see this now. I have many folders that are now empty.

I'm scouring the internet to see if this has occurred to others.

The last major thing I remembered doing was upgrading the PBO firmware.