Total Computer Wipe and Black Screen of Death

It wouldn't surprise me at all if this was the result of a virus (any antivirus software I had installed was flimsy at best) but yeah, it's pretty shitty to find out after a reboot that most of your hard drive's been completely wiped and anything that still exists operates at a snail's pace.

This is an error I've heard of in the past, but never really worried about because it because apparently it's not all that common to get with some newer computers.

Quickly after restarting my computer the log in screen displays as normal, and the process of logging in itself wasn't really different than any other time.
But once it started up, well, actually nothing started up at all.
No desktop, no applications, not the start menu even, just a completely black screen.
Luckily, task manager still seems to work after I pressed ctrl+alt+del and it was through it that I found I had 932 GB of space left in the harddrive, meaning the rest had been deleted, presumably by whatever caused the black screen in the first place.

After some experimentation, it turns out very few applications actually survived, one of the few useful ones being chrome. The control panel, windows explorer, start menu, and most other appliances apparently no longer existed on my computer, which severely limits in how I can approach this problem at all.

Of couse there are better places to go than these forums of all places, but I'm kinda desperate right now strangely enough the forums is one of the few sites that doesn't seem to run like complete ass as of now.

If I had to guess, it's a virus, plain and simple. I just have no idea how to fix this, or even if I can.
It's proving really difficult not to lose my shit right now after finding out that my computer has literally lost all of its shit, and if anyone has any sort of sugestions or potential solutions, that would be just peachy.

 

you can't delete ram

 

That'd be just the fact that nothing's running then, sorry my mistake.
The C: and D: Drives are almost completely empty though, so the point now is that 'almost everything's been deleted on the computer' I guess.

 

rm -rf /
Whoops. Wrong OS...
deltree c:\* /y

Turn that computer off right now and send the hard drives to data recovery. DO NOT CREATE NEW FILES. In fact viewing this site is populating your cache, stop that entirely (after you finish reading this of course). When files are deleted they aren't actually deleted, they are just removed from the file/folder structure and a flag is applied to say "feel free to overwrite this data with any new data". When you get your files back from data recovery do not put them on your new c drive (yes, new) or do anything with them until they've been scanned for viruses. Last of all keep backups of all your important files, preferably before this incident or with a time machine if you have one. You never know what might happen.

Or if you don't care about anything on your computer, have the files you need elsewhere, or don't want to wear the expense then just wipe both drives completely and start anew.

 

If you can afford it you should get professionals to attempt to recover your files.

Also remember to back up your data in the future.

 

Wow, it really sucks that this happened, I hope you can manage to recover your files.

 

If you can't manage to recover your data as pointed out previously, I really, really, hope that you at least used some sort of backup. Or at least a cloud for a few important files. If you did that then all you need to worry about is a liscense key for windows. Similar thing happened to me on a computer a few years ago so I switched to Linux temporarily.

 

your files should still be there to some extent. there is a possibility that the virus could've overwritten your file's binary data bits allowing your hard drive to gain free space. But that also means you can recover your files by using a utility that scans the tracks and sectors of your hard drive for any evidence of deleted files. If the utility found anything, it will attempt to restore all your files exactly as they were before they got deleted, but expect a few files to be corrupted.

Since your able to boot into Windows, then yeah you can recover your data. But if that virus would've initiated a low level format, you'd be screw, because a low level format rewrites all the sectors in your hard drive to "0" making data recovery impossible. In this case, your lucky that didnt happen.

I maybe blabbering on and on, but trust me. I went through the exact same crap 2 years ago, and I was able to recover all my data. The only corrupted files were just a few pictures. That was about it.

 

this was a month ago
i am sure that tsuba here has figured out everything by now and has fixed the issue

 

Thanks for the friendly intentions but,
Like spirit said I've got it covered now.
If only those damn technicians hadn't had to wipe everything...

 

I hope it fixes itself.