Has your computer suddenly started saying youy've got LOTS of disk errors?  If so then you could well be infected with a recent nasty...

There is a fairly new infection which masquerades under the title of 'Data Recovery - S.M.A.R.T. Check' and shows a screen which looks like this...

and probably a lot of other windows giving dire warnings about write errors then you've got the infection!  What you don't have is a corrupt disk, despite what it's telling you!

So what does it do...

In short, it makes your computer almost unusable!  Your desktop goes black, all your files, documents and icons on desktop will be gone and your start menu will be empty - and that's only the bits you can see!

It totally messes up your system but, it can all be recovered!

Some basic information...

There are a few things that should immediately shout out at you with this sort of infection, which help to identify it as just that.

In the first place, if your disk drive really HAS got all these errors on it, the solution is to check out the disk drive with reputable (free) disk checking programs and probably replace the disk drive.  If things are that bad then a piece of software isn't going to fix it!

Secondly, you should always be very suspicious of any process which runs and tells you it's found problems and then shows something like...

If it's asking for money then it's almost certainly a fake!

So what do I do?

Getting your machine back to normal can be quite a complex task since not only do you need to deactivate the rogue and remove it but you also have to recover all your shortcuts, documents, etc. which have been hidden (rather than deleted) in various different ways.  A search on Google for something like 'Remove S.M.A.R.T Check and Repair virus' should provide you with many links which would allow you to have a go at fixing it yourself, however, if you're unsure, you should be able to get back to normal by restoring back to a restore point before the infection occurred.


Alternatively, Call on Ken!