All folders empty, but over 100gigs

[SheltonMac]

While searching MS's KB yesterday, I got hit with what Sophos reported as more than 30 viruses (the alerts rapidly flooded the screen) right before the laptop rebooted itself. I kept getting errors that the was no memory for windows and that my HD had too many bad sectors. My 250gig HD only had 110gigs stored on it.

Now after rebooting into a backup account (as I the laptop rebooted within seconds of logging into mine), I was able to run scans (Sophos and Malwarebytes) repeatedly till they both said there was nothing left (oddly, Sophos never showed any viruses found - even the logs were empty). Also when I logged into the backup account, the errors about memory and HD problems stopped - before I did ANYTHING else.

Once getting the 'all clear', I was able to log back into my own account - only to find what appears to be a stripped out User Profile (no wallpaper, no icons, and only 'sample' files in all the libraries - and My Documents ONLY has my PST files).

I searched the C: drive (the entire drive is 1 partition) and find that all the folders are on the root of the drive. When I click on any to browse what is inside, the are all 'empty'. The only folder that has anything in it - is Program Files, which only has the Malwarebytes folder (probably because I installed that after the laptop went bonkers).

Puzzled how the system can run with no files, I tried copying an 'empty' folder to a network share - and Windows then reported that it was moving over 8900 files (over 3gigs). When I use another laptop to view the network share, all my files are sitting there.

I then tried accessing the C$ share from my other laptop, and can see the share - but NONE of the folders within.

Next, figuring I see the Malwarebytes folder - I created a new folder on C:, and copied my entire profile folder (almost 40gigs) into that (took over an hour for it to copy that). I then looked at the folder from my other laptop, and it is EMPTY. I went back to the original laptop, and see that Windows is reporting that it is indeed EMPTY 'No Files' (even though it took over an hour to 'copy' what it reported as 40gigs.

It seems that one of the infestations has thrown a switch to hide all my sub-folders and files, but how can I 'un-hide' them???

 

[Carolyn]

Run this utility

http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/grinler/unhide.exe

 

[SheltonMac]

It errors out - unable to open unhide.bat in a buried temp folder.

 

[Carolyn]

aswMBR - Scan

Please download aswMBR.exe ... © Avast Software ( 511KB ). Save it to your desktop.

1. Double click the aswMBR.exe to run it
2. Click the "Scan" button to start the scan.
3. On completion of the scan, "Scan finished successfully" press the "Save log" button.
4. You'll be prompted to save a file named "aswMBR.txt"... Save it to your desktop.
5. Please copy and paste the contents of aswMBR.txt in your next reply.

Note: A file will be created and placed on your desktop when you execute aswMBR, named MBR.dat... this is a copy of your MBR record, before we make changes, it can be used to recover the MBR record to it's previous condition, if problems exist after changes. Please copy that file to a thumb drive or attach it to your next post for safekeeping.