A pretty serious virus somehow made it past all my computer security. Its put copies of itself EVERYWHERE. Its the first time I’ve had to deal with this (I’ve always been careful.) And of course I didn’t know until WAY too late. The computer was a little laggy and “hanging up” on processes so I rebooted and discovered I couldn’t. 30 minutes of waiting and Windows still hadn’t started. System Restore disk was useless, too many system files were “unrecoverable”.
To avoid having to reformat I bought a new harddrive and once the computer was back up I googled the file name I kept seeing during the restore attempt. Its a virus. Found at least a hundred copies of it in *all kinds * of weird places. I’m having to use file recovery software to find all the photos and docs that I never bothered to backup (stupid, stupid, stupid!). But of course it recovered THOUSANDS of files I neither want, nor need. I’m having to slog through it all (there’s no semblence of order to it) to find what I want. And I know I won’t get it all… AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!
I would have responded sooner, but the recovery software “recovered” about a HUNDRED THOUSAND files. I’m slogging through them for stuff I need. It’s tedious, but I’m glad I’m finding stuff.