Bad crash yesterday on torrent beta - virus?

[Hal]

I was all set to do a fresh install of the Official Microsoft Download RC - new drive and everything.

Yesterday my computer crashed hard. The screen was frozen and apparently it was in the middle of an AVG scan when it happened.

Auto recover wouldn't work. System restore wouldn't work.

I looked at the drive in DOS and there was a partition called D: that I didn't install with a few files of mine on it. C: was not accessable.

DOS says almost all of the drive is empty except for the files on D:

This was a beta downloaded from PB that was working fine all along.

Did I get an infected beta from PB or is it some other virus or issue probably?

Am I the only one?

Anyone have any good data recovery programs to recommend?

I have the drive on a USB adapter now and device manager recognizes it as a USB mass storage device but when I try to populate properties I get Type: Unknown, Status: Not Initialized, Partition style: Not Applicable.

It was a 3 month old Barracuda 7200 500 Gb.

 

[Orbital Shark]

Hi Hal, welcome to the forums.

Windows 7 creates a new partition of about 100MB for recovery perposes.

Have you tried re-formatting the drive from explorer? Also if you have the RC burned to DVD you could boot from it & instead of formatting then installing, try deleting the partitions and re-activating. This will completely wide your HD making it ready for installation.

Hope this helps




Jeff

 

[matt_0978]

I was all set to do a fresh install of the Official Microsoft Download RC - new drive and everything.

Yesterday my computer crashed hard. The screen was frozen and apparently it was in the middle of an AVG scan when it happened.

Auto recover wouldn't work. System restore wouldn't work.

I looked at the drive in DOS and there was a partition called D: that I didn't install with a few files of mine on it. C: was not accessable.

DOS says almost all of the drive is empty except for the files on D:

This was a beta downloaded from PB that was working fine all along.

Did I get an infected beta from PB or is it some other virus or issue probably?

Am I the only one?

Anyone have any good data recovery programs to recommend?

I have the drive on a USB adapter now and device manager recognizes it as a USB mass storage device but when I try to populate properties I get Type: Unknown, Status: Not Initialized, Partition style: Not Applicable.

It was a 3 month old Barracuda 7200 500 Gb.

maybe try formatting it with active@killdisk, i think that drive is otherwise dead.

 

[Hal]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I installed the Microsoft RC 7100 downloaded from the Microsoft site on a fresh hard drive so I am up and running. I have most of my files backed up or located on an external drive that is OK.

My main concern is trying to recover my Outlook data since my last backup from the bad drive.

I was also curious to know if there have been others with the same problem using PB beta downloads or if this is just local bad luck.

 

[Orbital Shark]

There may be several data recovery apps available, you'll nee to just google/bing 'data recovery apps'

Also as far as getting builds from other sources i'll PM you

 

[7echno7im]

Sorry to hear about your loss.

The only time I had to do a recovery on a hard drive not backed up that got wiped, I used EASUS data recovery wizard. It worked very well, even after a format. I was able to recover most of my files, and even a few virtual machines that were almost 5GB is size. There are some free ones out there, but I have never found ones that would recover after formatting, only after deleting them from an active partition.

As for a safety measure in the future, use the outlook backup add in, and have it dump to a 2nd or 3rd drive weekly, or even a usb drive.

Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders Backup tool (works on 2007 too)

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA010875321033.aspx

 

[7echno7im]

as a second note.

If you use any of the Microsoft mail services (Hotmail, Live Mail) I would suggest using the outlook connector over using their pop service.

Microsoft Office Outlook Connector
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102225181033.aspx


This add-in allows you to use the different MS mail services and keeps them stored on the MS servers. It is pretty much like a personal exchange service. You can store your contacts, calender, and mail on their servers and still access them using outlook. The benefit of this is that if you have a system crash, you dont have to worry about your PST file. It caches them in an OST (offline PST pretty much). folders, sent mail, and everything is stored on their serrvers and cached to your local machine and sync'd accross webmail. That way you don't have to ever have to back anything up. (as far as outlook is concerned)

 

[StonR]

AvG crashed my pc when i installed avg Net Secturty so i used avast. im on 7100 to
i had to Boot Into safemod to get avg of becase at startups it was giving me BSOD lol