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Cannot find users and folders after virus removal

#1 User is offline   dkurim 

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Posted 19 May 2011 - 08:39 AM

Hello,

New to this forum. I got scareware saying my HDD had bad sectors and freaked out. My hdd is a refurb so it seemed real. I ran Malwarebytes and AVG in safe mode and everything seemed fine. I rebooted and then my desktop went black with no icon and everything is missing from my start menu, Also I cannot access my documents or additional HDD. I am pretty noob at this stuff. So if anyone could be patient or kind enough to help me out that would be great!

thanks in advance,

DK

#2 User is offline   quietman7 

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Posted 19 May 2011 - 10:07 PM

:welcome:


The symptoms you describe can be indicative of a side effect from the HDD Defrag family of rogue security programs which changes file attributes to "hidden", making them appear invisible so the user thinks some of their files have been deleted. Newer variants of the FakeHDD rogue delete Quick Launch and Start Menu items/folders.

Please download unhide.exe by Grinler and save to your Desktop. Double-click on the file to run the tool.

After running it, all files will have the "hidden" attribute removed. This includes files that are normally hidden by the operating system and any files you may have intentionally hidden. The tool is designed not to remove hidden attribute for system files. If Quick Launch and the Start Menu were deleted, unhide.exe will attempt to restore them back to their proper location. When done you will need to restore the hidden attributes to those files manually. To do that, open Windows Explorer, go to Tools > Folder Options > View and make that change there.

Note: Do not clean out your temporary files/folders until this issue is resolved.
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