Facing an unknown problem with my PC; only folders open.

Jacee said:

bProtector for Windows ... searchplugins and browser PUPs. AdWare Cleaner will take care of these pests.

See if it runs in safe mode.

AdWare Cleaner from "Adware Cleaner - Free Trial Download - Tucows Downloads"?

Edit:
Wait, brainfart. I went back a few posts. I ran AdWare and it got rid of something, but when I tried to open it, it would not.

Okay, so, I finally cracked down and took it to my local PC repair shop. The fellow working there plugged it in, booted it up, and everything went well. They said they would have a look at it and see what was wrong, even though they determined my RAM was no longer shooting up at a quick rate.

With that statement, I bid him farewell, and went on my way and wait to see what comes up. Between the time of drop off and pick up, I did research on some external hard drives to buy so that I could back up every little bit every week or so. I thought that after the PC was fixed, I'd ensure it to never happen again.

However, it wasn't necessarily fixed. In fact, I do believe it's in a worse condition. The man failed to back up the PC correctly, and when he tried to restore it, only some files (like a few in the %appdata%) survived, as well as every PC folder I had, and not a single .exe file (thank goodness I took a screenshot for some reference in case I accidentally buggered my background, allowing me to fix it,) made it through. Keeping a calm head, I paid him his money, left, and went to see if I could do anything to get it back.

Plugging it in, and booting it up resulted in a very familiar state...
IT WOULDN'T SHOW UP TO THE LOGIN SCREEN ONCE MORE. Frustrated, I thought "Well, then what the heck could be causing this havoc?", and decided it must lie in the cords. Putting that as the "only reasonable explanation," I raced down to buy a new PC display cord. And guess what was the result with that?

Success.

Coming to realization, I now knew I pretty much just paid some guy to wipe most of my files WITHOUT even the thought "Oh, jee wiz, it works just fine with my cables. Maybe I should tell him to go buy a new display cable first and then return to me if it persists," occurring to him. Outraged, I begin to tinker away, downloading .exe after .exe. But, sadly, with my country internet, I knew it was no use. I'd have to just wait for better bandwidth.

Okay, now after my excellent little story, I wanted to ask if there's any way to retrieve my lost files, or if I should just give up, and re-download EVERY little megabyte? I know cops can find some supposedly "deleted" files pretty well on hard drives, so, this gives me a sliver of hope.

Also, I looked at my system restore points, and not even any points from last year (my last restore point) showed up, so a System Restore is out of the question.

Perhaps this would help.

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

marsmimar said:

Perhaps this would help.

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

Alright, got that downloaded, and ran it to scan the largest it can go (all files every where), and after a few hours of scanning, I'm met with the error attached to this post.

A question I have is: Are these supposed to be USB drives? If so, I checked Start > Computer and have no USB drives plugged in, other than my keyboard USB, my mouse USB, wifi adapter (I think that's the name...) and my USB hub (just for the sake of conformity, the 3 USB devices are plugged in to the hub). Obviously all devices are instlalled correctly, me being able to type, navigate to this website and be connected to the internet.

Do you have a card reader on your PC? that might be the reason as it can't find media on those devices.

hybridfan said:

Do you have a card reader on your PC? that might be the reason as it can't find media on those devices.

The only devices I have plugged into my tower via USB are those listed above through the HUB tower, a display cable and an unplugged-on-one-end HDMI cable.

Should I run the program through something like TeamViewer on another devices with everything else unplugged?

Well, I've got Recuva to run, and wanted to know if it'd be best for me to put the restore path to something such as an external hard drive, or right onto my computer's drive? I'm unsure of it, and am a little anxious, wanting as much advice for this as available.