Computer experts,Advice please!

[s car go]

Hi all,

Wife was downloading some stuff yesterday,and she has inadvertantly downloaded a virus or the system had a wobble!! Did a system restore and all seemed OK,but we seem to have lost all our photos,and files! In "My Pictures" all the thumbnails are showing with 4 small pictures showing what the contents of the file shold be but the file seems to be empty when I click into it.Our screen saver is a slide show of our photos and is working normally,so the photos are on the system somewhere.Its not a total disaster as I back up regually to an external hard drive,but I have'nt done it for a month,so I've lost a bit!

Any advice appreciated

Mark

[KERRSURF]

Just use the 'time machine' function in Mac OSX to restore it back to where you need it.

[s car go]

Just use the 'time machine' function in Mac OSX to restore it back to where you need it.

Thanks for reply

Should have said its Windows XP

[KERRSURF]

Ah......sorry then, it's fooked.

[J i m s t e r]

Download Avast! and MalwareBytes (google them, both free) and run them both to keep it free from malicious palaver.

[K2Surf]

Do you know how to get to your screen saver properties? Click Start, click Control Panel, click Appearance and Themes, and then click Display.

Can you go into the properties of your screen saver and see where it's getting the images from?

[JD_975]

Technically they are still there but not there if that makes sense! By doing the system recover windows has removed the start links to the files, the files are still there untill they get overwritten by other material.

Theres a free data recovery program called recuva which you can download from filehippo, I use it to recover data from damaged laptops etc for people but I normally have the hard drive connected to another machine to do it, not sure how it would work running on the same hard drive you are trying to recover data from but its worth a go mate.

[Scorpion]

A long shot, and it will show all the pictures loaded on your hard drive, but from the bottom menu bar try - Start: Search: All Files And Folders: All or part of the file name: .jpg

Enter .jpg in the 'All or part of file name' box.

Assuming you saved your photos in jpg format it should find them all.

[s car go]

Thanks all for taking the tile to respond!!

I found the solution. The virus concerned was Windows-XP-Rocovery. It presents itself as a very convincing windows application indicating that the hard drive has bad sectors or a critical error has occurred. The virus then adds a +h to all of your files to hide them,so they are there,but hidden. You are given the option to purchase a fix for the "problem" which of corse dose'nt exist. If anyone else is hit by this one I Found the solution Here:-

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/viru...ws-xp-recovery


Thanks once again

Mark