Author Topic: Lost permission to create, write, delete files in My Documents (Read 11288 times)

GlenT · « **on:** December 14, 2013, 10:27:22 am »

Had a weird event under Windows 7 Pro 32bit. Normally clean machine. Computer froze immediately following an e-mail send from Outlook. Had to power off. When I rebooted, I had lost the ability to create, write, delete files in My Documents (which is mapped to a separate partition on my computers: drive D:).

Nothing turned up on full scans with Kaspersky. Rootkit scans come up negative. Malwarebytes found one item (Malware.Packer.Gen) but cleaned it. Subsequent rescans come up clean. I ran your full Windows Repair all-in-one including disk scans and reset file permissions. Still no access. Suggestions?

GlenT · « **Reply #1 on:** December 14, 2013, 02:53:31 pm »

I did manage to sort this out. I backed up the partition, deleted it, recreated it and then copied the data back. The whole thing was kind-of unsettling. Really no idea what caused the computer to crash in the first place.

Shane · « **Reply #2 on:** December 16, 2013, 12:12:16 pm »

Sounds like you got hit with a boot sector virus. Those are hard to find and to clean. And normally the only way to get rid of them is to delete the partition and recreate it.

Which sounds like you cleaned it up when you did that.

I am starting to see more and more viruses like that because they are far harder to clean.

Shane

GlenT · « **Reply #3 on:** December 17, 2013, 04:15:27 pm »

This wasn't a primary partition, though. It was a logical partition, so no boot sector. There was no effect on drive C:, which continues to operate normally.

Shane · « **Reply #4 on:** December 18, 2013, 12:43:58 pm »

The virus could have still affected the file system. I have seen that before. A lot of times they target what ever drive they ran off of. But it is hard to say now that it is working.

Could have simply been a fluke as well and the file system got messed up from a bad reboot or power outage and simply remaking it took care of it

Shane

GlenT · « **Reply #5 on:** December 18, 2013, 02:47:41 pm »

I think that may have been the case. I was running multiple copies of WinZip at the time, doing backups, and one of the machines I was backing up had a disk error which caused the drive to loop infinitely, hanging up WinZip. I found this out later when I went to redo the backups. Perhaps one disk error begat another, by WinZip hanging my machine.

Shane · « **Reply #6 on:** December 19, 2013, 12:53:07 pm »

Yeah and then the file system simply got messed up when all that happened. Sounds like that is most likly what happened. And when a file system gets damaged you did the best thing to fix it, you recreated it fresh

Shane