350 gig hard drive is almost full with nothing on it?

R

randynh

New Member
I am having a problem with my computer. I would say I have about 60 gig of documents, videos, and music on my hard drive. I recently re installed windows because Vista had some type of bug where I couldn't see anything on the hard drive and my icons had dissapeared off of the desktop. Before re installing windows I backed up the computer on an external hard drive and DVDs. I am now trying to re install all of my documents, but it shows that my hard drive is getting close to full. It says I have about 80 gig free out of 290. This is before I reinstalled any documents. i assume that my documents may be somewhere already on the hard drive, but i have no idea how to access them.
I am also having a hard time finding the documents on the external hard drive and can't install copy from the dvd's. Any help would be greatly appreciated
 
If you are saying you were infected, them a lot of the current malware will hide your documents, programs and desktop icons in a temp folder. You can try running unhide.exe to see if anything reappears.

http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/grinler/unhide.exe

You may need to right click on that link and click on open in new window.

Did you do a repair install? In order to do a fresh install you must delete the exisiting partitions, then repartition, format and install windows.
 
the unhide program didn't work. I assume when you mention a repair install of windows that the hard drive would have been formatted? I did not do this I simply reinstalled via the disc that came with the computer
 
did a disk clean up and realized I had to delete old versions of windows. That freed up 110G. I am still having a hard time retrieving old files
 
So I began installing a backup I had from dvd's prior to the windows re installation. The files end up in 1 folder on my desktop. Is there a way that I can have the files go back to original locations?
 
Hi there,

I work for an AV company and we see this every day. Most malware will hide your icons, remove links etc to make it hard to clean up.

First you need to clean the infection and once that is done you will need to show the hidden files, showing them whilst your still infected wont help, they are usually re-hidden on boot.

You don't need any fancy tools to show the icons, simply launch this command from the command prompt.

CD C:\
attrib -h -s *.* /S /D

I'm assuming you have up to date AV protection i.e. Avast or AVG if you want free stuff?

Oh and for the lost icons e.g. My Documents etc
  • Right click the task bar
  • Properties
  • Start Menu
  • Customize
  • Enable the lost icons
If program icons are lost the only way to recover these is to add them back manually.

Hope this helps.
 
Jon Boy said:
Hi there,

I work for an AV company and we see this every day. Most malware will hide your icons, remove links etc to make it hard to clean up.

First you need to clean the infection and once that is done you will need to show the hidden files, showing them whilst your still infected wont help, they are usually re-hidden on boot.

You don't need any fancy tools to show the icons, simply launch this command from the command prompt.

CD C:\
attrib -h -s *.* /S /D

I'm assuming you have up to date AV protection i.e. Avast or AVG if you want free stuff?

Oh and for the lost icons e.g. My Documents etc
  • Right click the task bar
  • Properties
  • Start Menu
  • Customize
  • Enable the lost icons
If program icons are lost the only way to recover these is to add them back manually.

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...

Running UNHIDE.EXE will make your program files reappear as well as long as you haven't ran any temp file cleaner. So why not run one little program that will do all of what you just said?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top