the new WINMX ate my hard drive's data

[hoyeru]

I don't know who to turn to Over ask for help. MY recolection of evens is a bit fuzzy but here is what happened.
I d/led the new WinMX 2 weeks ago. I didn't use it much and last Friday I let it ran. Then on Saturday morning my system began acting funny. It was responding slow. I think I had shut down WinMX at that point. When I checked my data drive D on which I save my d/loads, to my horror my data was being eaten infrot of my eyes and files were left empty or filled with weird characters, I KNOW this because when i opened a simple txt file it had nonsense data inside. Whole folders were gone with nothing but a few weird character left for file names.
In panic I rebooted the machine and when it came back the hard drive was NOT accessible. I haven been able to re-format Or access the Maxtor hard drive now at all. Partition magic doesn't work, the Maxtor CD doesn't work either.
Luckily I had made back ups a few hours before.
For whole week I ran anti virus soft but it detected nothing. Had no problems at ALL!
Then this Friday night I decided to run WinMX again and when i started it it have me a funny message about not having enough memory to run some kinda program. It made me suspicious but the system was running fine.
I let WInMX run overnight-NO PROBLEMS! Then on Saturday morning I got up and decided to reboot. The minute I shut down WinMX the virus appeared again and again it attacked the D Drive.
Now I am NOT blaming WInMX or saying the new version has a virus but I AM PRETTY damn sure the problem began when I shut WInMX down. ANYsuggestions or ideas?
Sorry if this is NOT in the correct group but I didn't see any group about having WinMX problems so i am posting it here

[7]

I doubt it'd be caused by WinMX personally.  I guess it's possible it could be some dodgy software operating on your machine though I'm a bit skeptical of this, sounds a bit extreme, and am more suspicious of the condition of your Maxtor harddrive judging by what you wrote (random data in text files).

I suggest you go about checking the condition of the drive first to try to determine whether it's healthy or not.  Grab the 'Powermax' application from Maxtor @ http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm, stick it on a floppy, and boot your machine from it.  I can't remember offhand but the application has options to perform a health check on the drive.  It may be worth performing a full READ-ONLY surface test (could take a long time to complete) to be fully sure.

If you get to the point where the data on the Maxtor HDD is FUBAR I'd recommend using the Powermax program to perform a low level format to recertify the entire harddrive (rewrites the entire drive to zeroes) on the offchance it can be brought back to life.

Good luck, and if you are at least able to read from the drive and have anything important on it, get it copied off ASAP.

[GhostShip]

Whilst in agreement with 7 above about the hard drive being in a bad way , its always a good idea to have backups of critical files, and keep up to date on anti-virus software.

Two weeks ago I read of yet another p2p worm, just one of many, most are network specific so often winmx has no problems with them others will hit anything and destroy as much data as they can, will everyone please make a habit to scan non mp3 files to save heartache and headache.
There is always the change that what has happened to Hoyeru could perhaps be related to one of these viruses or worms, and its better to be safe than sorry folks.

A good time to do a scan is while you sleep by the way 

[Josh]

well it makes me feel better i just backed everything up yesturday lol