Disk Cleanup gone mad? or virus maybe?

[oreses]

Hi all you helpers

I would really appreciate any lead here please.

Sitting on my computer today i saw a Windows message that one of my partition drives is full and suggested Disk Cleanup.
I OK'd it and allowed it to erase Temporary Files as well.
after it finished I clecked the drives Properties to see how much space was saved and saw that the drive is almost totaly empty...
I started to open the drives folder and saw that although all folders are there - no files exist!
14 GB of pictures and other important files are just gone...
Trash is empty too...

What can be done?

 

[newgirl]

would a restore to previous date help in this case??

 

[speed_hog]

Oreses welcome to TSG,
be careful what you do with the hard drive... Or all is lost...
*
The first thing you want to do is unplug it ASAP and don't use it until you figure out what is happening as any hard drive activity may really make the data unrecoverable...

Tell us more info what security software are you using etc...
Don't empty the recycle bin and check and see whats in there.

 

[oreses]

OK
first to answer your questions Speed Hog and new girl - The recycle bin was empty when I looked for the files there. Tried to restore but no restore points exist (which is very strange 'cause i schedule it...).
my AntiVirus is BitDefender free edition v10. It found nothing and is updated.

What I did do is download a File Recovery program called Active UnErase and that managed to do the trick! I recovered about 23 GB of data (although I had only about 14 in that drive as far as I know...)

So I still don't know what exactly happend and if it's a virus, I stil can't detect it BUT I have my files and i'm backing them up right now.
Do you think it's safe to use that partition drive again?

 

[speed_hog]

oreses, I would read the sticky posts at the link below to get an idea of what malware can and will do and then maybe post a HJT log and have an Expert look at it.
http://forums.techguy.org/54-malware-removal-hijackthis-logs/
Your issue is strange and that is what malware does...

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next to their name and authorized malware removal trainees have a blue shield

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[oreses]

I'll read and learn