UH oh.
Quickly perform a file system check, and find some corrupted files … and those that would normally replace them, are also damaged.
In general, one of two things does that: virus, hard drive failure.
Checked with Malwarebytes, clean bill. I reviewed the health of the SSD with Crystal Reports; There are no problems at all. Strange.
Looking at the system history, I see a Windows update just before the most serious things started, so I decided to try to undo it.
*boom* Hell broke loose. Blue projection, only it will not come back. I have to assume that Crystal Reports lost something, and the disk (cheap Adata that came with this system) was in poor condition.
As it is the main disk, and I have recent backups, it was tempting to simply restore one on a new disk (I had the foresight to have a 250GB Samsung Evo 850 on hand here), but one of the two complete sectors per image sector (naturally the newest) was almost empty. I have to assume that some missing dll caused the backup to fail in some way (the reported size was correct, although it was empty) I could not be sure how viable the previous one was, but I'm really happy to have access to at least files and files. configuration, so the time for a complete reinstallation and manually turns everything around.
24 frustrating hours later, it's almost where I was when everything went south in me. Well, apart from the raft of more than 160 Windows updates waiting …
Lesson learned?
If you see missing or damaged files on an SSD, assume the worst and have a spare drive at hand.
Keep more than two backup images for each unit.
Keep the documents and the operating system / programs in different units, since that made things much more complicated than it would have been.
