Weird File Corruption
- by Viet Norm
My Windows 8 broke few days ago and I had to reinstall it (see Can't boot Windows 8).
Afterwards, I found some corrupt files on C drive. Ok, it happens, but this is really weird. Corrupt files seem to contain stuff from Windows registry. For example, this is beginning of one of the corrupt files:
hbin ` PÿÿÿT h i s z o n e c o n t a i n s w e b s i t e s t h a t y o u t r u s t n o t t o d a m a g e y o u r c o m p u t e r o r y o u r f i l e s
...
I googled and found that 'hbin' often refers to "hive bin" of Windows registry. Then I searched the registry for the readable part of corrupt data, and found the text in some registry value (not the text above, but something I found in another corrupt file. I'm assuming the above is also from registry).
My question is, how could this happen? Was it a virus, or did Windows somehow corrupt these files while attempting to repair itself?
