I installed Avast Premier two days ago. I ran the data shredder overnight to clean up free space on my C drive. The following morning I noticed that many of my data directories were apparently missing. It turns out that these have had their system and hidden attributes set.
The directories were OK as far as I can remember just before running the Data Shredder, and were apparently missing immediately afterwards. No other software was being run (at least not by me) at the time.
I know that setting of hidden/system attributes is commonly a symptom of a virus infection but I have not had any virus warnings.
I did the following:
- Immediately ran a quick virus scan, which was clean.
- Run a boot scan and a full system scan, both of which reported that the system is clean.
It seems unlikely, but could there be a problem in Data Shredder that could have caused this? It seems the sort of thing that a mass cleanup of data areas and directory trees might cause, although I would expect corruption of links, not the setting of system/hidden attributes.
Alternatively is there a new virus that Avast did not (and still cannot) detect?
I use Windows 7. I have not installed any new software for many weeks other than Avast Premier.
Can anyone suggest what I’ve hit and how to deal with it?