Something strange happened and I'm not sure what to think. I went to play a game on Steam and found that it was no longer installed. In fact...none of my Steam games are installed. 500 GB of games...not installed. Windows itself still shows the installs in Programs and Features but the hard drive itself shows nothing (all the folders are gone from SteamApps yet Steam itself is still there). I then went to play StarCraft 2 and found it was no longer on the hard drive either. Same with Diablo 3. In fact every single game is gone from the hard drive except Elder Scrolls Online... Any ideas on what may have caused this? S.M.A.R.T shows nothing wrong. I'm running SeaTools to check the hard drive over but I'm open to suggestions?
Sounds like a cruel malware program included in a pirated game to me. The only thing that makes data disappear is bad sectors, and if you had that many to wipe out tons of games, Windows would be screaming bloody murder. Are you on 7 or 8?
On Windows 7 here (legit legal version) and I don't download games illegally (love me some Steam) so I want to rule malware out as the cause (though downloading Malwarebytes to give it a quick run through). Bad sectors possibly...but the hard drive test came up clean. I'm running the longer test now to see if something is wrong with the drive. LOL thanks Lucidus.
No-one else has access to your machine? Someone messing about deleting your stuff ? Check the event logs too System Restore, not sure if that would bring them back... been a long time since I used it
That's pretty messed up... are you sure no one else has been on your machine ? A corrupt update maybe ?
100% sure nobody was using my machine but gonna take the safe route and nuke the site from orbit...a wave of discomfort has fallen over me regarding this install and nothing short of a complete wipe will fix that.
This is no malware or anything else. This is a unbelievable bug in the Elder Scrolls Online installer. The same thing happend to me on two(!) different PCs. From what I read online (others have also had that problem) this can happen if you install the game to another drive or a different folder than the default one. Makes sense to me, since I installed the game on a my second (D:\) drive on both machines. It deleted my entire program files directory. The only programs left are all installed on C:\ I can't believe how a huge publisher/developer could let something like that slip through. Also I'm surprised that not more people are affected by that. But rest assured, you don't have malware on your PC, except that game... I will reformat my machine, in this broken state I might as well go with a fresh install. I hope you will resolve your problems. Best regards
Bit late to comment but I had a problem with D3 on Steam. Some comments were similar to your problem (maybe not the same) And it seemed to be a steam problem. Just a little addition: I'm in Australia and we are in the Asia Pacific region. When I asked Steam for help they sent me stuff written in Chinese! WTF ..........
There are many professional people available for Data Recovery in UK, if you are unable to do it your self then better visit an expert.
Old thread revival... ya ya. This literally just happened to me. Went to install ESO and it deletes every file on my SSD. Wow. So ****ing pathetic it's not even funny. First I waste money on this garbage game and then it deletes every ****ing file on the drive I was installing to but wasn't even installed on yet. Completely unacceptable.
