My husband's PC has WIN98 and was working fine. I scan with NAV daily and do weekly scans for spyware. During a recent NAV scan, the PC froze and when rebooted, it cannot find the system disk.

I can use a NAV Restore disk to boot, but there are only 3 C: files . . . with weird SMILEY face characters.

FDISK shows the one drive is 100% full. It looks as if all the C: files were deleted and a few gigantic bogus files were created to fill the drive.

Is there any hope? Is this a virus? (Nothing was installed/changed on the PC)!

I tried to FDISK and cannot delete the partition because the volume name has a funny smiley face CHARACTER I cannot figure out how to type!

HELP!
I think that the smiley face character kind of "gives it away"... This sounds like a virus to me... Especially how your hard disk was suddenly "MAXED out" with information... That's not a common thing... I suggest two things... (1) Buy a new hard disk. (2) Call an exorcist! You will need an old priest and a young priest, lots of candles, and maybe just a shot of holy water... Good luck!

[glb]Flame[/glb]Actually you could see that smiley face if the FAT table GOT hosed, this could also display that the drive was full. It could also be a bad circuit on the drive causing misread/unreadable characters. Nonetheless, the solution is probably the same.

Replace the drive or fdisk and reformat (which you can't do because you can't type the character).

You may be able to get a bootable version of Partition Magic and delete the partition there without having to type the volume name.Thanks so much for the suggestions! The exorcism hasn't worked yet but I'm still in the early stages.

I'm downloading Partition Magic and will give that a try.

I've put 4 hours into troubleshooting this and have gotten NOWHERE! Until you guys . . . thanks for pointing me in another direction. I was getting ready to use the CPU for a boat anchor!lol I've been there before! Oops! Did I just say that out loud? You keep in touch... (And by the way... exorcisms take time... Stay strong! lol )

[glb]Flame[/glb]