OMG! has this happened to anyone before?

[Borman]

I know how i accidently killed "My Documents". I accidently tried renaming the folder when i was clicking fast in Flashfxp, it worked alright, but my folder went poof! Then on next reboot i had the folder again, but nothing at all inside of it. Thats when i knew when it was Format time lol.

[Alusnova]

Well yeah , all the stuff that was deleted is what you consider "pirated" software ( I do own some of the stuff but yeah others you download).

That's why it's so odd, nothing else got touched, say they/it wanted to mess with my games, my Half life 2, WoW,NWN for example are intact ( I own these) all my program files,system files are fine, my computer it's fine, just that all my "pirated" software is gone.

The only thing I installed was the Nero software that came with the DVD-R drive I bought (think Nero6) , after that when I checked boom! my stuff is gone. Very odd, maybe since the copy of Nero that comes with those commercial drives has to be 100% legal , it associated the files and saw that they are "suspicious" and deleted automatically, can't think of anything else that could have done this unless someone really hacked into me.

Oh well dropping the issue now, I be wary of the next commercial software i install really.


Alsunova

[ZeikHunter]

i have no problems with nero 6, legal or otherwise. im not gonna say its impossible, but its highly improbable that some software can distinguish warez from non-wares withought a rather large database.

another thing they all had in common was they were all cd image files, which you can associate with nero. uninstall it, or mess with the file associations, see if that brings anything back.

[Pyro_420]

THIS ladies and gentlemen, is why I never keep anything in the My Documents folder...Unless you enjoy losing all of your data each and every time you have to reinstall Windows, you should NEVER use My Documents to store important and/or valuable data, or any other folder on C: for that matter...I use 2 HDs in my comp. One contains my Windows install and all my games, progs, etc. that are on it, and the other is my storage drive that contains all my ISOs/images, progs, emus, ROMS, music, movies, etc. And ALL of my P2P progs are set to download to my storage drive, each with its own seperate downloads/shared folder. This can also be done with only one HD by partitioning it, but it must be big enough to have at least 10-15 gig set aside for Windows, and the rest can be allocated to storage...Also, make sure to turn off system restore on your storage drive/partition so that Windows has ZERO system files on it...BTW, I use Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro, which enables you to recover data from your HD without having to use another PC...just set the source drive, and then designate the recovery directory and be sure that it is located on either another HD or a different partition

[Mistral]

THIS ladies and gentlemen, is why I never keep anything in the My Documents folder...Unless you enjoy losing all of your data each and every time you have to reinstall Windows, you should NEVER use My Documents to store important and/or valuable data, or any other folder on C: for that matter...I use 2 HDs in my comp. One contains my Windows install and all my games, progs, etc. that are on it, and the other is my storage drive that contains all my ISOs/images, progs, emus, ROMS, music, movies, etc. And ALL of my P2P progs are set to download to my storage drive, each with its own seperate downloads/shared folder. This can also be done with only one HD by partitioning it, but it must be big enough to have at least 10-15 gig set aside for Windows, and the rest can be allocated to storage...Also, make sure to turn off system restore on your storage drive/partition so that Windows has ZERO system files on it...BTW, I use Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro, which enables you to recover data from your HD without having to use another PC...just set the source drive, and then designate the recovery directory and be sure that it is located on either another HD or a different partition

Ironically, this only worked for me until my storage drives self-destructed beyond the ability to even access...just back up regularily, as master already warned and I relearned the hard way. And rather, I've had several installations of Windows, and have managed to maintain data in the My Documents folder over all of them merely by the prudent precaution of backing it up before launching the installation. Again, though, because of the fact that none of this was on my storage drive, they survived the loss of almost all of my games, videos, ISOs, and ROMs. Losing my Photoshop work was bad enough, but losing years worth of stories instead would have been catastrophic. Not to mention all the digital copies of books I have right next to them...

[Kazekage Gaara]

This sorta thing also happened to me. I have Windows XP Professional.

I used to have a folder called "PS2 FAQs" in "My Documents" and had like 50+ folders in that with game names. I had like video reviews, Cheats, Gameshark Codes, Code Breaker Codes, etc, etc. Most of them were in .doc format (MS Word) and many of them were saved webpages and pictures .jpg format. I shutdown the computer and after like 30 minutes my younger sister started up the computer and logged in as Guest.

After playing games on the comp, she shutdown the computer and next day when I started the computer early in the morning, Everything that was there in "PS2 FAQs" folder was gone. All the 50+ folders of game names were STILL THERE, but the contents of it WERE GONE.

I asked my sister if she accessed the folder, but she said she didn't do anything and I had to Believe her as when people log into windows xp as "Guest" you CANNOT access other person's My Documents Folder and all the read, write priveleges are not there and you can't even delete a desktop shortcut or delete a text file or create a new one. No installation of any programs....no uninstallation of any programs.

But still I couldn't figure out WHERE ALL OF MY STUFF WENT. I also had subfolders inside those 50+ folders but still there was NOTHING inside it. Also, the subfolders were STILL THERE BUT EMPTY.

At that point in time, I only used "My Documents" folder for that purpose and didn't use any other folders so don't know whether they were empty too or not.

I posted this coz YOU are the first person I encountered on the internet who had the SAME PROBLEM just like me.

Its really sad that you lost 50+ GB worth of stuff.

If you find out what caused this, do post here. I will really appreciate it.

Thanx in Advance.

[Khaotic]

try getting a virus scanner and scanning your pc for trojans you could have picked up one you never know!

[master]

I have a feeling that wasn't a trojan. He said he tried to rename his my documents folder...