How to blanket decompress an entire hard drive with mixed compressed and uncompressed files

[Killerbanana]

Hi Everyone,

I think I've got a computer virus that compresses things against my will and I was wondering if someone on this forum could help. TLDR at bottom

I first noticed when media files (youtube videos, Amazon radio, offline WAV, mp3 and mp4 files) would not play back correctly. When I pressed play, the play button would turn to a pause button like the video was meant to be playing, but I'd see about 1 frame every couple of seconds with no sound.

Next I noticed that files on my desktop had been compressed, and that actually throughout my C drive quite a few files had been compressed.

My suspicion is that codecs in the Windows folder have been compressed by a virus, so media won't play back properly.

Antivirus (Avast, Malwarebytes) has not found anything. GPU driver, Windows, Adobe are up to date. I don't have restore points to use system restore. I could do a system refresh or reinstall, but seeing as I have about 3TB of programs and data that would take at least a week to redownload this would be a last resort.

Just a little bit more background and where the virus *might* have come from: I noticed around August that my Android phone's SD card started playing up. I could write files to it, but they wouldn't read from it. I formatted the card in my PC, but the error was still there so i figured it was a faulty SD card. A couple of months later (which brings us to last Saturday) I plugged it into my computer just to check it wasn't a problem with my phone and to try and play back one of the videos recorded onto the SD. This is the first time on my PC that I noticed the issue of a media file not playing back correctly as described above, but I figured it was because the SD card was faulty. Now I am wondering if there was a virus on the SD card that had a chance to transfer onto my system when I played the video file, but not when I formatted it a couple of months ago. I'm usually quite careful with the websites I visit etc, so I would still be surprised to find a virus on my SD card, but it's possible an app from the Play store could have contained a virus. Or could the SD card have corrupted my computer files without any viruses being involved?

TLDR: I am wondering if perhaps I can address the symptoms by asking Windows to decompress everything on the C drive, whether it is already uncompressed or not (because at the moment not everything has been compressed by the 'virus'). It would take many hours to manually go through every file and try to decompress it because this unwanted compression has affected the Windows folder, hence why it would be nice to do a blanket decompress on the whole drive.

I earn my livelihood composing on my computer, so any advice would be really appreciated and many thanks in advance!

 

[rgd1101]

could be disk failing or run out of disk space.
there is options in windows to compress to save disk space
https/www.tenforums.com/tutorials/26340-compress-uncompress-files-folders-windows-10-a.html

 

[Killerbanana]

The C: drive has 11GB out of 100GB space left, so I don't think it's that. I followed the command prompt instruction to try and decompress all of C: but I just got this:

" C:\WINDOWS\system32>compact /u "C:\Windows" /I /Q

Uncompressing files in C:\


0 files within 1 directories were uncompressed. "

 

[rgd1101]

when you said compress, are they in a different file extension?

 

[Killerbanana]

Yes, for example CDesktop, CDocuments, C:\Windows\Panther, C:\Windows\Logs\CBS, bits of C:\Windows\System32 etc.

I should add that not all files at these location have been compressed, it tends to be the larger ones but there doesn't seem to be an exact file size where it becomes compressed or not. Maybe it depends on the type of file.

 

[rgd1101]

Yes, for example CDesktop, CDocuments, C:\Windows\Panther, C:\Windows\Logs\CBS, bits of C:\Windows\System32 etc.

that just directory name. I mean files, why do you think they are compress? just file size? and not file extension?

right click on one the "compress" and look at the properties and look at one that is not "compress"

 

[Killerbanana]

Oh apologies. Yes all sorts of file types have been compressed: etl, .mlf, .txt, .pdf are among the ones I could find with a quick look that I have not decompressed yet.

I've noticed all the hidden folders in C:\ProgramData have been compressed, which includes .exe, .dat, .msi, .res files ranging from 1kb to 30,000kb or more.

 

[rgd1101]

Oh apologies. Yes all sorts of file types have been compressed: etl, .mlf, .txt, .pdf are among the ones I could find with a quick look that I have not decompressed yet.

I've noticed all the hidden folders in C:\ProgramData have been compressed, which includes .exe, .dat, .msi, .res files ranging from 1kb to 30,000kb or more.

if they have the same file extension, and windows compress not turn on, they are not compress

if only media not playing correctly, check your cpu/gpu temp and usage, ram/hdd usage, hdd health check.