Need a little help

[Elementgreen]

I wasn't too sure where to put this, but I am confident that this community will steer me in the right direction... So here's my problem.

Earlier today, I believe a virus somehow fiddled with one of my HDD's. I had just woken up (still adjusting to my 3rd shift job...) and I had careless clicked on something that looked like an Adobe Flash Update... but I'm sure it wasn't a legit update. After I had just clicked on the box... some of my desk top icons were grayed out. I also noticed that my secondary hard drive (where I keep all of my games, music, etc) wouldn't show any of the files in the hard drive... yet it's telling me that there's still all the original data left in the hard drive. Several error messages eventually popped up saying that my SATA/IDE drives have been messing up ( I can't remember the exact message). It asked me to restart... which I shouldn't have done, I suppose. Before I restarted the files in that hard drive were grayed out, but I could still browse them nonetheless. Now some stuff on my main drive wont show either.

Some things on that hard drive actually work properly, like my Steam games, and other things that I can manage to pull up without getting into the hard drive. So, what can I do to fix this problem? I can't do any sort of system recovery, as it was never activated to begin with (I had no idea...), so that's definitely out of the question.

 

[4745454b]

Run a virus scan then? Avira, AVG, or trendmicrons house call is where I'd start. You can also try using hijackthis, but you'll probably need help from their forums if you want to use that.

 

[englandr753]

Avast is also good...and free too. You can try to clean your system as best as possible but from my experience it's usually best to do so with the intent to recover your files.

You never know for sure that the infection is 100% removed even though scanning software may not pick anything up. Infected systems usually still have a buggy feeling to them to me after a serious infection.

Nonetheless, if it seems to run fine to you after removing infections then it's probably not necessary to reinstall the OS. I'm a freak like that so it's my perrogative to do it, needed or not.

 

[Elementgreen]

I've already removed the infections, sorry if I did not make it clear in my initial post. Removing the viruses didn't seem to do the trick.

 

[englandr753]

Removing the viruses didn't seem to do the trick.

Thats what I meant by the system usually still seems buggy even after a supposed virus removal. 98% of the time, I simply reinstall the OS...

 

[Elementgreen]

I really want to see if I can at least try to save the data that's on my hard drive... I have a lot of music projects and other things that are extremely important to me. Like I said, the data seems to be usable, but none of it is visible.