Virus Question

[Typhoon Willy]

Hi everyone,

I have all my important files backed up onto an external hardrive. However, I wonder if it may be infected with a virus. I plugged it in to my computer and a moment later accidently pulled the USB plug out of the socket and in the lower right hand corner got some kind of error message about I:\$Mft did not completely transafer and some data may have been lost. The only thing I could find on the 'net was that Mft stands for Master file table and has to do with NTFS. Can anybody give me some more background or insight?

Thanks,

TW

[Donald Piper]

My guess here is that if you were not transfering any files on to the external drive at the time you should not have anything to wory about.

[bearcat241]

No viral intrusions to be concerned about. Its just a potential internal system data management problem you might be looking at, like data corruption in some files and folders. Every drive or partition on your computer has an MFT (master file table) which acts like a drive administrator or drive registry for all the data contained on the drive. Its kinda like the filelist.dat's or the addon INDEX files associated with CFS2---the big boss who keeps track of everything. When you suddenly disconnected the drive, you interrupted Windows as it was in the middle of an indexing operation updating the MFT on the external in the background. The system is telling you that and its saying that this may result in a problem later when attempting to access some files. Its a fixable thing...just try to find some time later to refresh the backed up critical files with new updates from your active system drive. For example, if you have your CFS2 main backed up on the external, back it up again with an updated version and delete the previous backup to save space.

[Typhoon Willy]

Thanks guys for your input. I should have also mentioned that this drive was connected to my 'main' 'puter which crashed on me last Friday, which is why I was concerned that it may be infected, secondly, I was, in fact, just beginning a virus scan when the plug was pulled.

Also, before the big crash on Friday, there were a couple of times when I was not transfering files either to nor from this external drive and yet noticed it was running. If there was no activity initiated by me, would there be any reason why this should not be dormant or in a sleep mode?

Thanks again,

TW

[Donald Piper]

That may be a good question for someone working in a company computer department atmosphere or computer store. I know what its for and how to use it but I'm not up on external hard drive theory.

[bearcat241]

Three things primarily contribute to "dormant" drive activity:

Explorer network crawling
Windows Indexing updates
Scheduled Task network search

Any one of these background services can and will access an external drive without your input. Its just part of the autonomous Windows management system, but all three can be turned off with registry tweaks. That's where things get a little complicated if you're not familiar with working in your Windows registry. There are also some registry tweak tools that do this for you with a few checked boxes, like the program called 'CachemanXP' for instance. It has a tweaks tab for manipulating these features in Windows.

A fourth possibility could also be your external drive's software management program that also loaded along with the drivers on the installation CD. These programs run silently in the background also and quietly "talk" back and forth with Windows in updating/indexing transactions regarding drive structure and content.

[Typhoon Willy]

Bearcat,

I thank you very much! It really does sound like I was sweating over nothin' but I think I'll run a scan anyways (it never hurts, right?).

Mr. Piper, your responses are also appreceated as well.

TW