In an effort to post more. . .
I think someone hacked my wife's computer. When I got home, it was frozen at the screen I left up. Nero, having finished buring a CD. Nothing else running. Caps lock wouldn't light the keyboard light, indicating a locked cpu.
Okay, so reboot. No operating system. Tried xp install disk. Recovery console gets a C prompt. Dir won't even work. Getting desperate, I try fixmbr to fix master boot record. Then fixboot to fix the boot sector. Still won't work. Chkdsk finds an unrecoverable error on the partition. Scandisk finds that my newly reconfigured jumper is limiting the hd to 30 gigs, and begins marking bad sectors. Oops.
I tried to recover the files by slapping a small hard drive on the cable. No, now that I configured the jumper right and tried fixMBR, I can't see any files.
Amy lost all her Mp3's, roughly 25 gigs worth. All our budget spreadsheets are toast. She really labored to organize and collect all that information and music. I feel terrible.
The computer was fine when I left, with nothing running but an Idle cd-burning program. No firewall, no anti-virus, files shared. All I can think is that it was maliciously hacked, because this was no spontaneous hard drive failure. The hd is fine, no damage, and somehow the first sector, which isn't accessed in normal use, was totally ruined.
My conclusion: we were hacked, bad.
Okay, so reboot. No operating system. Tried xp install disk. Recovery console gets a C prompt. Dir won't even work. Getting desperate, I try fixmbr to fix master boot record. Then fixboot to fix the boot sector. Still won't work. Chkdsk finds an unrecoverable error on the partition. Scandisk finds that my newly reconfigured jumper is limiting the hd to 30 gigs, and begins marking bad sectors. Oops.
I tried to recover the files by slapping a small hard drive on the cable. No, now that I configured the jumper right and tried fixMBR, I can't see any files.
Amy lost all her Mp3's, roughly 25 gigs worth. All our budget spreadsheets are toast. She really labored to organize and collect all that information and music. I feel terrible.
The computer was fine when I left, with nothing running but an Idle cd-burning program. No firewall, no anti-virus, files shared. All I can think is that it was maliciously hacked, because this was no spontaneous hard drive failure. The hd is fine, no damage, and somehow the first sector, which isn't accessed in normal use, was totally ruined.
My conclusion: we were hacked, bad.