Hard Drive Data Lost?

[CinderElmo]

Never seen this one before. I was installing Office 97 service pack 2 on an older Pentium 233 box...when it restarted it gave me an error saying Invalid system disk. Physical diagnostics of the drive appear OK, but when I boot to a floppy and look at the HD there is only a "box" symbol which has a file size of 0 present. All data appears lost. Even put it in another PC to verify. Properties of the drive (in the other machine) show it as 25% full, which is about right. The data however, is not available...

This machine had been working fine before this. Anyone ever seen this mysterious "box" symbol instead of file names before?

Thanks.

[Wayward Clam]

Not specifically but I've run into similar things before. Any chance it is a boot sector virus? Have you scanned it?

[Darren Wilson]

Is the HDD using a Drive Overlay or other Disk Manager Software?

[JungleMan1]

Well, it probably has nothing to do with Office 97, probably just a really really dead hard drive. My best bet is just to replace the thing.

[CinderElmo]

No overlay on the drive. I am beginning to think it was just coincidence that it failed while rebooting from the MS Office SP update. I virus scanned the disk while it was in my other machine, but not sure if the boot sector of that disk was scanned since it wasn't being used to boot the machine...

The drive passes all SMART tests and manufacturer diagnostics...but strangely now when I view the contents of the drive it still has the box, but also has a file called mbDocked.H - doesn't show up in any virus database I can find but it sure LOOKs like a virus

Maybe the Microsoft Service Pack installer was loaded with UNwholesome goodness hehe.

[EvilKlown]

fdisk/mbr ?

[elacious]

I ran into a similar problem before... did u by chance have either an antivirus program or "go back" running when you installed the update? one stupid thing i've done more than once was not restarted when the install finished, and then when i did restart 2 days later, i forgot about the update and when norton came up and said your master boot record has changed...well u know..
hehe u live and learn!!

[Crypto]

It sounds like a virus to me, too. another good suggestion in a previous post was "fdisk /mbr". Whenever I have something like that happen I IMMEDIATELY run the best data recovery program I've used (Lost & Found from PowerQuest) if the partition table has been corrupted or overwritten by a virus of some kind then the more diagnostics you run the less chance you have of getting the data back. Run data recovery software first, diagnose the drive w/ something like spinrite later.

[CinderElmo]

Some good advice from you guys. Thanks! This is the first time something like this has happened and at first I thought it was a power surge or something (since we had electricians in the bldg. at the time). It was only later after I took it out that other options occurred to me. (I will never ***-ume again!)

I still am not sure what happened to the drive, but I suspect that the data would have been recoverable had I done things sooner. This is not a critical computer so I wanted to see what would happen if I just installed Win98 onto it - just a test to see if maybe it was a controller or something mechanical. Upon running scan disk it started to uncover all the directories and files that were "previously" lost.

It appears that whatever was responsible corrupted the file tables...whether it was a virus, surge, physical problem, or something else is another story...(this is an older box so the sky is the limit on faulty components)

Of course the user of this machine would probably never admit to doing something like downloading a virus-prone .exe or the like - but I will ask her