Hello all,
My first post to this board over a problem I've been struggling with all day. If anybody has any suggestions I'd be very grateful to hear them.
Win2K SP4
A secondary hard disk, 300Gig, partitioned into three, 100 gig partitions. (letters I, J, K )
Maxtor BigDriveEnabler active to cope with the >137Gig issue.
All was fine until this afternoon.
I rebooted and then found that everything was taking an age to happen. Opening Windows Explorer was taking a very long time to show all the drives.
I then saw that Partition K wasn't showing it's drive name (K: Music), just K:
After clicking onto the drive it told me after a pause that the drive wasn't formatted and asked if I wanted to format it.
The other 2 partions on the disk were accessible.
In Computer Management/Disk Management it tells me that the drive is empty of files with 100% free space.
I ran OnTrack EasyRecovery software and all the files were there. I recovered all 40gigs of data to another drive with no errors.
So it seems that all the data is there but the "index" to them has been lost somehow.
At the same time as this incident happened my IE has started playing up. When I type a URL it just sits there for about 30 seconds before going to the page. However, if I select a previously entered address from the drop down arrow on the URL line then the page loads straight away and clicking links within pages loads the next page immediately.
I ran a full Norton AV check and it discovered 3 viruses since yesterday (when everything with my system was working fine) that had made it through Zone Alarm Pro firewall somehow.
It deleted them. The viruses were ".exe" (W32.Esbot.C), "b.exe" (W32.Spybot.Worm), "iinstall.exe" (Trojan.ISTsvc).
It's VERY rare for me to get viruses - I scan every three days and have only had one in 4 months - so I'm guessing that all this partition messing up and then IE breaking down isn't just coincidence.
So I'm pretty confused right now.
My data has all been recovered but I'd like to see if the index (partition table??) could be repaired somehow since all the files are still actually there.
And also, are those viruses likely to be the reason everything else is running on a go slow?
And finally, if I have to format the K: drive again using Disk Management, even though EVERYTHING is still there and working when copied over to another drive with Easy Recovery, will it damage the other 2 partitions (I: and J
on the drive?
A lot of words and if you've reached this far I'm already very grateful.
Thank you for ANY suggestions or explanations.
Cheers,
Johnny
