AVI's Have Mysteriously Been Stricken Unplayable/Unreadable? (Worm/Virus)

[com crumb]

AVI's Have Mysteriously Been Stricken Unplayable/Unreadable?
(Worm/Virus)

I just did a clean install of windows last night and was amazed to
find myself in the midst of a virus attack as I logged online to grab
my windows updates. I've never had anything like this happen so it was
a big shock.

Anyway, after three fdisks and three clean installs (and finally
enabling a firewall--stupid me), I am virus free.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not suffering from the attack:

Since last night's attack about a quarter of my 320 GB of raw footage
(yeah, 320 GB) is now unreadable. This footage resides on two separate
hard drives, and the affected files reside on only one of the hard
drives.

Premiere's message: "Unable to open that file. File is either damaged,
an unsupported type, locked or in use by another application."

Media Player 9 opens the file but the audio is a digital train wreck
of squeals and squeaks and the video doesn't display at all. Also, the
duration of the clip (minutes/seconds) shows that the file is roughly
3 times as long as it should be. The file size I don't believe has
been changed, though.

Quicktime refuses to open these files because it says that "it isn't a
file that Quicktime understands."

The files' "DATE MODIFIED" doesn't reflect any changes in the past
day. They all reflect the last time I trimmed the files--late last
month. They all played fine before this attack.

Also, if I right click the files to get their properties, it lists the
file as a "Video File" (and the extention, *.avi has stayed the same).
But, curiously, if I click on the tab "SUMMARY" where information
usually could be found about the clip, now only this is shown:
"Summary properties are unavailable for the selected source(s)."

And, finally, to add to the mystery: The worm/virus also infected my
"Music/MP3" hard drive (200+ GB of files). Initially, the hard drives
contents "disappeared". But Windows XP (on its own--without my
request), ran a check on the hard drive during a bootup and in a
process that took half an hour, recovered what it called "orphan
files". Now the hard drive is up and healthy and all the files seem to
play fine.

However, I have a large collection of pictures/jpgs and tens of
thousands of those have been rendered "unreadable."

While that stresses me out somewhat, what really matters right now is
this raw footage. Is it recoverable? Can you at least help me
understand what transpired?

Thanks.

 

[Lisa]

while your situation is somewhat different from what i've seen and could
be the result of the worm/virus attack (do you happen to remember the
name of whatever did the attacking?), some of what you are saying sounds
like a codec issue. Could you have possibly encoded those files using a
codec which is no longer installed because of your recent reinstallation?

 

[com crumb]

while your situation is somewhat different from what i've seen and could
be the result of the worm/virus attack (do you happen to remember the
name of whatever did the attacking?), some of what you are saying sounds
like a codec issue. Could you have possibly encoded those files using a
codec which is no longer installed because of your recent reinstallation?

The worm was the blaster worm, and it wasn't the cause of my problem.
It threw me that something was in my system and so I spent 12 hours
searching for help using the wrong terms.

The cause of my problem as it turns out was my not having yet
installed the latest Promise driver for my IDE controller card. It was
a strange combination of "symptoms" though--to see a file on the hard
drive and yet not be able to play it.

Anyway, THANKS SO MUCH for trying to help. I was so depressed. Now
everything is A-OK.