Computer Woes

The last month or so has brought an onslaught of tech woes, mainly computer-related. I'm typing this post as I'm in the midst of backing up a whopping 40GB of my mum's stuff on DVD.

So, what happened? A lot.
1) Serious virus infection.
2) Dying HDD.
3) Formatted the wrong HDD.
4) Ultimate, unremovable virus(es)

Solved (1) with simple scan through Spybot to remove system.exe

(2) was the source random freezes, finally escalating to a reboot loop. Bought new HDD, but it doesn't end there.

After making sure that all data were safely on the slave, I went through the motions of formatting the new drive. Scroll down, choose partition, press 'D', ENTER. I can't remember the exact sequence of events, but what I do remember is when I loaded a fresh OS, the first thing I did was check the secondary drive, only to be greeted by a pop-up asking me to 'Format drive to use'. Which meant that I had deleted the partition, which meant the HDD was blank, which meant every single bit of data accumulated over the past few years are gone, zilch.

So on to the web to look for ways to recover data. HandyRecovery4 worked well except for some files with name too long. Happiness.

Now onto (4), this batch of viruses, infected through USB drives, disguises itself as New Folder. Disables task manager, connects to the net on its own, and finally, screwed explorer. Impossible to do anything since its always running, including in Safe Mode. Only option left is a full format.