I have a computer that until a few days ago, was working fine. Then, when I turned it on, it wouldn't load XP and infinitly printed a bunch of these ♀. I took it out and put it in my other computer, and I can read it fine, but it's a 40 GB hard drive, and it only shows up as 5 GB in my other computer. As well, it shows none of the files that I had. Is this a virus of some sort? If so, what can I do to get my files back?

You should run a manufacturer's drive diagnostic to determine whether the disk itself has failed or not. http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic7602.html

We can pick up from there, dependin on the answer.

I recommend runnining the full test for your drive a couple of times, to help get the most accurate results since drive problems can be intermittent.

It's a Western Digital, so I ran the WD Diagnostics program. I ran the extended test 2 times, and it passed both times. Oh, and it shows the free space as 0 bytes.

ouch! 0 free is usually a corrupt partition table,
but it can sometimes be a fact -- you crammed it to the limit. investigate the
partition table validity first.

Well, I ran chkdsk several times, and it keeps showing errors, even if I chose to fix them. I also ran Active@ Partition Recovery, and it shows the partition as NO(E, which is not something I named it, and that 27.5 of the 37.2 GB are used. I don't really care if I have to reformat, but I have some data on the drive I would like.

Doesn't anyone back up important data around here :eek: