Need Help with FAT Crash (?)

[baraka_17360]

Please help with FAT crash problem.

I have been on dial-up for 10 years. At last I was able to install broadband through Hughes satellite and in 3 week encountered severe something (???). I cannot figure out for more than 2 MONTHS (!!!) what is happening - and this is with 17 years of working in computer field and installation and troubleshooting of dozens of OSs... Never saw anything like this.

I have Win2K SP4 on 3 partitions.

My problems began when suddenly some of my directories became unreadable with bunch of files and non-existing subdirectories consisted of scrambled characters: squares, symbols, etc. of mega-Gb sizes!!! It happens on data partitions, OS - everywhere - I have 3 hard drives. When this happens on OS, computer naturally crashes. Then it became much worse with crashes on 2 other computers of my home LAN.

The other problem was a complete wipeout of the active partition!

Here how it looks: http://members.toast.net/narayan/photos/characters.jpg - maybe you need to expand the screenshot full-size.

I was restoring the old systems (that worked for years without any problems) from the drive images and data from backups, but problems continue.

Deleted, re-created partitions, just reinstalled Win2K core on NTFS from scratches – crashes again and again! Looks like virus, of course, because “clean restores” crash the same way.

Scanned with McAfee, Kaspersky, Bitdefender, F-Prot, spyware programs, etc. and did not find anything. If you need more info about my systems please let me know and I would post HiJack This.

I am absolutely devastated, because my work depends on computer and I spent already literally HUNDREDS of hours and could not even come closer to the solution.

Your help would be appreciated with NO LIMITS of my gratitude.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

[ɹəuəllıʍ ʇɐb]

Welcome to the Windows Forum.

This looks not good, indeed! A question: when you restore from backup, is it an image restore, or just file restore over the existing installation? If the latter, malware could easily survive such a restore.

What I would recommend as a first step is to run a full online scan from http://housecall.trendmicro.com/; this can take a long time, but will detect all kinds of malwares. It is also able to fix many issues.

Unfortunately we are no longer able to process HJT logs. If you need (after the Housecall scan) to have someone analyze a HJT log, go over this article, then run HJT and post it in the indicated forum at Castlecops.

P.S. I would also run a CHKDSK on all partitions.