Hard Drive Funny Business

[Ephirith]

Earlier today (yesterday) I was installing a... complimentary copy of Battlefield 1942. (Although I did own the game once but lost the CD's, whatever)

Norton didn't like the keygen files and, in a masterstroke of poor decision-making, I exempted the keygens, restored them, and used them. It felt a little like unprotected rumpus humpus with a very nasty hooker and I'm ashamed to be have been so careless.

Anyway, fast forward to about an hour ago, I wanted to listen to a song before bed, so I navigated to where I keep my music and the folder was gone. I looked around everywhere, recycle bin, toggled hidden files, etc... nowhere. My hard drive, which had previously shown 80GB remaining, now shows 311GB of space. What the fuck.

What I find odd was that this seems to have been the only folder on my computer that was affected. In this directory, among various sub-folders, I keep my music, photos, movies, TV shows, important documents, basically everything important that isn't a game or on my desktop.

I ran a utility to show deleted files, and they didn't show up. Then I initiated a system restore to the point at which I was installing the game and keygens, which was the earliest point available. Oddly enough, some of my files returned. The main folder is there, but 95% of the shit inside is missing. My TV show folder for example... most of the folders are completely gone-- those that remain only contain subtitles, and even then only for some seasons.

Luckily I keep a backup of this stuff on an external hard drive, and I think all I've lost is some more recent music files.

But I'm curious what the hell happened: If this was a virus, why and how did it target the most annoying folder possible? How did it know? It could have wiped my download folder, my games folder, microsoft office, my desktop, but all that stuff is untouched. Any theories about how this happened? Maybe it was a bug!

*edit* Just realized System Restore doesn't bring back that kind of stuff. Stupid virus deleted only one folder-- not the most important one, just the most frustrating one.