NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[addicted2dvd]

I was hit by a bad virus or something... so bad I had no other choice but to completely reformat my hard drive. I lost everything! 

I will never get everything back the way I had it!

[snowcat]

Pete thats terrible :S I have been through that many a time! I hate computers!

What antivirus do you use?

[DJ Doena]

Sorry to hear that :-(

Didn't you have somebody who could check if he'd managed to save some of it?

[Antares]

I've had this happen at least twice in the last two years, but fortunately I had a backup disc of all my files.

[addicted2dvd]

Sorry to hear that :-(

Didn't you have somebody who could check if he'd managed to save some of it?

My brother... but he couldn't do anything else with it either.

I have a bunch of backups on my F Drive... but unfortunately I can't get to them right now... I need to find the disc that came with the hard drive... as the computer is not recognizing it.

[Najemikon]

Pete, that is a bloody shame. Does your brother know which virus it was at least? I wish you could have said something before committing to flattening the system. There are always options.

[addicted2dvd]

It would have been nice... but it wouldn't even let me open a browser.

[Najemikon]

Hold on. You mean, it was still getting into Windows at least? Oh, Pete, I guarantee that was retrievable. The only type of virus that should ever cause you to format is the type that stops the computer booting at all ("system disk not recognised", etc).

Please, if this ever happens again, find some other terminal or person to get a message on here because there are several easy things to try first that we can help with.

[addicted2dvd]

will be sure to from this point on 

[RossRoy]

Oh Pete.. Like Jon said, you unfortunately lost everything for no real reason.

For future reference:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/8693/how-to-remove-antivirus-live-and-other-roguefake-antivirus-malware/

Save that somewhere, and refer to it should anything ever happen again.

[Touti]

Pete I'm sorry about your computer hassles but I think it's an opportunity to pass a message to everyone.  I don't know what the heck is going on but there's a burst of spam, spyware and viruses that has been going around the last few days. 

We hardly ever get spam in our mailboxes at work because we have a pretty good hardware firewall and antispam and yet everyone has been getting some for the last few days.  I have some pretty good protection at home and I've been getting spam and viruses as well recently.

And just this morning, a friend of mine got something got some crap called Antispyware-soft on his Laptop at his work, he never saw it coming, has no idea when and where the trojan that let it in was installed but within 30 minutes one of their servers and a few other stations were infected with viruses.

I don't want to start a panic and scare anyone but hackers, spammers and "virusers" seem to be extremely agressive these days.  Everybody should make sure they have a good up to date antivirus and antispyware.

[Jimmy]

Talking of virus, spyware and other shit like that... Be prudent if you receive an email, facebook message and probably twitter message from one of your friend (in fact anyone who had your name in his contact list) telling you that he was stolen in a foreign country and need money to help him. This one run currently and some people I know were almost caught by this. The best thing to do is to contact the real person using a different way (if you get an email PM the person on a forum, ...)

[Achim]

Talking of virus, spyware and other shit like that... Be prudent if you receive an email, facebook message and probably twitter message from one of your friend (in fact anyone who had your name in his contact list) telling you that he was stolen in a foreign country and need money to help him. This one run currently and some people I know were almost caught by this. The best thing to do is to contact the real person using a different way (if you get an email PM the person on a forum, ...)

Here in Taiwan they use this method over the phone! They call people, tell them some story and ask them to go to an ATM right away and transfer some money for help. Amazingly some people actually seem to do it

[leo1963]

Hold on. You mean, it was still getting into Windows at least? Oh, Pete, I guarantee that was retrievable. The only type of virus that should ever cause you to format is the type that stops the computer booting at all ("system disk not recognised", etc).

Please, if this ever happens again, find some other terminal or person to get a message on here because there are several easy things to try first that we can help with.

Yes, Pete, please.  I personally have fixed several PC's that had this issue without any loss of data.  Good Luck.