I downloaded about 380 MP3 tracks overnight, total about 490 MB. Worked on them for a couple of hours this morning. Played maybe a dozen in my player/organiser, MediaMonkey, while editing filenames, titles, artist etc. Viewed them in WinXP Explorer, and also made some filename changes with Bulk Rename Utility.

Suddenly, they all vanished from the Media Monkey window, and from Explorer. I was dismayed to find that the files appear to have somehow been deleted beyond recovery. Not in Recycle Bin. And Norton Unerase Wizard could find none of them. Nor did using XP Find across the entire HD.

Pretty scary to suddenly lose such a massive amount of data like this! Because they were downloading overnight, they were not included in my automatic nightly backup to another HD.

A chkdsk on both my OS partition C: and my data partition D: found no errors.

Someone in the MediaMonkey Forum replied to my post this morning:
"the rria has made a virus they put on some of the servers and it is now out in the real world and will send them your computer info and delete songs if you got them from an illegal download site."

My downloads may well have included some which were 'illegal' in the strictest sense, although I'm confident the great majority were not. I was using my NewsRover program, trying to get some 1940s 'hit songs' from 3 binaries newsgroups alt.binaries.sounds.1940s.mp3, etc). I planned to select a few songs to accompany a slideshow I'm making for some elderly family members, based on old scanned photos.

Googling turned up a few reports of some bizarre RIAA-developed malware (Nopir.B worm?), which indiscriminately wipes MP3s, presumably in a sort of misguided vigilante spirit, but Spybot and Adaware found nothing (after the event).

Anyone know any more about that 'worm' please? Would Spybot have found it OK anyway?

Any other ideas on the cause?

And finally any suggestions on recovery please?

Any help or observations would be much appreciated please.

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Terry, West Sussex, UK

My downloads may well have included some which were 'illegal' in the strictest sense, although I'm confident the great majority were not. I was using my NewsRover program, trying to get some 1940s 'hit songs' from 3 binaries newsgroups alt.binaries.sounds.1940s.mp3, etc). I planned to select a few songs to accompany a slideshow I'm making for some elderly family members, based on old scanned photos.

did you get the songs from the same site?
if you didnt pay for them then they are illegal (unless you had a 30 day trial of napster or something)

Anyone know any more about that 'worm' please? Would Spybot have found it OK anyway?

no, you would need an anti-virus

Any other ideas on the cause?

you downloaded songs illegaly and one (or more) of them contained the virus

If your using an up to date anti virus program it should have caught Nopir - it's been around since last April. I haven't heard of Nopir being downloaded as a .mp3 file just mostly in hacked versions of DVD copying software and such.
You can try this free utility for recovering your legal downloads.
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html

Originally Posted by Rainbow32

If your using an up to date anti virus program it should have caught Nopir - it's been around since last April. I haven't heard of Nopir being downloaded as a .mp3 file just mostly in hacked versions of DVD copying software and such.
You can try this free utility for recovering your legal downloads.
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/restoration.html

Thanks for that helpful reply.

Using NAV, and definitions should be up to date.

Downloading Restoration, and keenly looking forward to trying it out!


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Terry, West Sussex, UK