Operating Sys loss

[Malady]

first time poster to this forum, so apologise in advance if i have picked the inappropiate board.

my machine is an AMD athlon, running Windows 2000, partitioned into two drives, c and d, 160 gig drive split into half using partitionmagic by powerquest. (i think)

I booted up the pc last night, to discover that the entire c drive had been converted into fat32 files, that is all 10,000 files were now 314MB split files, *twitches alot*. c drive, being of course, where the operating system is *slap self*..left with 4 folders on C drive containing all my data *scream*
But, d drive was totally untouched.

Now, there were no issues prior to booting up, was just a normal start, nothing had occured out of the ordinary, all virus scanners uptodate, firewall, security patches uptodate, spyware, adware etc. all had been scanned and updated throughout the week up to that point (for whatever worth that is)

apart from the loss of data, which easyrecovery seems to have fits trying to recoup, im more intrigued with that the heck happened.. than angry, although at the time my language hit new heights.

anyone have any clues ?

 

[office politics]

what changes were you making to the machine prior to this happening? What apps do you have installed? Do you have any scheduled jobs?

 

[Malady]

no changes at the time, was booting up the machine for the first time that day.

No schedules tasks, i.e any virus/defrag etc etc is all randomly done manually. Don't like set times.

Applications: some misc minor ones are missing

Windows 2000
IE
Netscape
MS office 2003 small business (inc: Outlook)
MS Access
Autodesk 2004
paintshop pro
Firewall/virus scanner
Winmedia
Winrar
Quicktime

everything else was on D drive and unaffected

 

[office politics]

have you run a virus/spyware scan?

 

[ImUseless]

Do you have anyone else in the family that uses this
machine? I think there are too many clicks of the "are
you sure you want to do this" buttons for this to happen
on its own.

I was amazed at how many things randomly happened
to my friends computer when his kids were still at home
and once they moved out suddenly his computer quit
having these strange problems.

Did you download or recieve any suspicious files that may
have done this to your system?

 

[Malady]

contd

csamuel: see first post, up to boot all scans had been done and showed up negative, any spyware removed as far as that is possible.


Imuseless: live with my partner and she has her own pc, exactly the same specs as mine on the same router.
no longer use chat messengers so dont accept downloads via that, i refuse email attachments and rules in place to avoid VB, .bat etc etc files, and hmm, *thinking back*

Last recent net download was an MS security patch and a game onto the D Drive called Dawn of War .. however that was done over a week ago and the pc showed no signs of problems until the other night.

*is stumped*

but with anything, there is only so far you can avoid stuff slipping onto the pc, but im hesitant to point this to being virus based.