Windows deleted a folder without my consent!

Welcome to Major Geeks

Windows does not delete folders on it's own.

• Either you had somekind of crash due to some application running that had this folder open and that caused it to disappear.
• Or you had malware that deleted it (highly unlikely - since malware does not selectively delete folders unless it was an important folder for your Windows OS or for security tools but you did not say what folder.)
• Or the folder was already missing and you had not noticed it yet

What exactly were you doing?
Exactly what folder is missing?

This would not be strange if you had a crash. The folder could be lost but the space is being used and chkdsk /f would have to be run to recover the lost sectors.

That's because it was not deleted.

I don't quite follow what you are trying to say! If the folder is gone then what do you mean its in another folder that you cannot open? What folder is it in? Sorry but giving us non-specific info can only result in non-specific help.

Actually this does not sound anything like malware and even if it was, fixing the malware would not recover lost folder/files/sectors.

If you want to check your PC for malware the below steps would be required, but do understand one thing, the more you install or do on this harddisk, the less likely you would be able to recover any of the files since there is a chance that the file space could get used by anything else that is installed. However, since you imply that no space was released when the folder was "deleted", the file space may not get overwritten either. And you may be able to use file recovery type tools to restore the files. This would not be a topic for the malware forum though. But you could look into tools in this directory http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads38.html


Below you will find steps to detect and remove any possible malware. It's up to you how you wish to proceed.

Please follow our standard cleaning procedures which are necessary for us to provide you support. Also there are steps included for installing, renaming, running, and posting HijackThis logs as attachments.

• Run ALL the steps in this Sticky thread READ & RUN ME FIRST Before Asking for Support
• Make sure you check version numbers and get all updates.
• Very Important: Make sure you tell us the results from running the tutorial...was anything found? Were you unable to complete any of the scans?...Were you unable to download any of the tools?...Did you do the on-line scans as suggested? etc.

• After doing ALL of the above you still have a problem make sure you have booted to normal mode and run the steps in the below link to properly use HijackThis and attach a log:

Downloading, Installing, and Running HijackThis​

Make sure you also rename HijackThis.exe as suggested in the procedures. Use analyse.exe for the new name. This is very important due to some new infections going around.​

• When you return to make your next post, make sure you attach the following logs and that you have run these scans in the following order too:
  • CounterSpy - only for Windows XP, 2K, & NT users
  • AVG Antispyware log - ONLY IF NEEDED you were not able to run CounterSpy. - only for Windows XP, 2K, & NT users
  • Bitdefender - from step 6
  • Panda Scan - from step 6
  • runkeys.txt - the log from GetRunKey.bat
  • newfiles.txt - the log from ShowNew.bat
  • HijackThis

NOTE: You can only attach 3 files in a single message so it will require that you use two messages to attach all of these logs!