Have you destroyed your hard drive lately? (Part 1)
I have, and it wasn’t pretty. Let me back up and tell you the story.
It all started when I installed a new game on my computer, called Battlefield Heroes. I played the game a few times, went to bed, and woke up in the morning for some family events. I connected to my computer later in the day, remotely, and was presented with a screen from Symantec Antivirus asking if I wanted to try and clean up some quarantined items. What? I had some questionable files?! I call BS!
I started searching my computer in the way I normally would: check running processes, check registry, check startups, check for rootkits. I checked my processes and expected nothing out of the ordinary, because, after all, there is no way I had a virus. But to my dismay, there was a unknown executable running that I was unfamiliar with. Had I really gotten a virus somehow? I killed the process, and it reran itself. Crap! I found the file and tried to delete it. Access denied. Double crap!
At this point I could have gotten deep into removing a virus, but I had previously told myself that I wanted to do a clean install of Windows XP anyway. So I remotely shut down the computer and decided that I would reinstall when I got home. And that’s what I did. It wasn’t until later in the week that I realized that this mysterious running process was Punk Buster, an anti-cheating system installed by Battlefield Heroes without telling me. Thanks EA!
I started my normal process of reinstalling my system. My system was partitioned into a primary (OS) partition, and a data backup (logical) partition. I backed up all of my important files onto the data partition. I popped in my Windows CD and started…
I selected my partition, which was the only one in the list, and did a quick format of NTFS. Window’s started installing and that’s when I realized that I didn’t see my second partition in the list. Oh, maybe it was just the chipset drivers. I know that Windows has an issue with viewing SATA drives if you don’t have the proper drivers installed. No big deal.
I booted up Windows after the installation finished. My partition was missing! I installed SP2 and my chipset drivers, rebooted, and my partition was back. It was back, but it showed up as UNALLOCATED SPACE! NOOOOOOOOOO! These were really important files: pictures of passed loved ones, source code, years of collected data.
Is it time to panic? Yes.
