File Corruption problems

I am currently trying to help a friend save files from an external drive that He has. It is a 500 gb external WD drive formatted Fat32. His backup drive. The music files are not as important as the Family pictures. Unfortunately due to other problems with his system these are the only copies. It was during a rebuild of his system that this wass discovered.

The Problem: The music files and the picture files have become corrupt. Only those files. All other files are fine. The folders and folder structures are ok, just the files within them are borked. Filenames and extensions of those are shown only as symbols... The files appear to have the correct file sizes listed until you check the file properties, they are all 0 kb.

I\We have: Run multiple diags, CHKDSK, Virus\Malware scans, thinking either bad sectors or virus. Nothing found.

I am currently 90% finished running HDD Regenerator on it but again nothing has been found.

Does anyone know of malware that would only attack these files and cause this?

Any other ideas?


Here is a screenshot. http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/385/screenyy.th.jpg

See what I mean about the file sizes?

How'd u go with this Rik? Check Eventvwr for any clues. Check Language settings too, perhaps a rootkit that stealths? Also, has he plugged the external drive into other systems before the corruption?

Yeah, I gave up. He had let a friend use the drive and that is when the corruption happened. He had his drive mappings setup so that when the drive was connected his My Docs folder was mapped to the external drive. It was my guess that when the friend connected it to his system the mappings became "confused" and possibly mixed the My Docs of both systems? Is that even possible?

I dunno. I was at a loss.

Yeah, the drive mappings can get confused, even on your own system, so throwing it on another just leads to chaos! i.e. Assign the drive the next free drive letter... yours might be F:\ mine is I:\

Could have been a retro-virus (mutil-headed hydra - lol)... but like the old days of Floppy's, they infect the boot sector of the USB drive, and infect/corrupt/transfer when plugged in... I never share my 'important' usb stick.

I'd say if you ran the chkdsk/HDDregen/etc, and still not fixed, then it's toasted. Do a low level format and hope for no new bad blocks.