System Volume Information???

Camman

I was working on a damaged computer recently and I noticed this "System Volume Information" folder which was hidden and could not be opened because of Access is Denied error. I thought maybe it was part of the viruses and spyware problems on this particular PC, so I for the most part ignored it. I cleaned out all the spyware and viruses but the Windows installation was damaged so I needed to reinstall XP. I install the harddrive into my own PC to backup some emails and things like that.

Well I just noticed that on both my C:\ and F:\ secondary drive I now have a folder called "System Volume Information" that I can't open and it's hidden. Perhaps I just never noticed it before or maybe recently I un-hid hidden folders, I can't remember. But I don't remember the windows operating system having a System Volume folder that I wasn't ALLOWED to open.

Anyone have any ideas on this? Should I be concerned about a virus? I ran AVG and spybot but didn't find anything.

I've attached a screenshot.

primesuspect

That's a totally legit folder. It contains the NTFS meta stuff among other things.

Camman

oh alrighty, good to know, thanks! I was just concerned because I hadn't noticed it before (guess I'm not very observant ) and I was all paranoid after installing this infested harddrive in my personal system.

I really need to spend the money to setup a test rig for doing stuff like that so I dont risk my own system when doing PC repairs for customers and then I can just blast out and restore XP on the test system whenever theres a problem

Straight_Man

And, it is System access only, normally. You CAN change that, but only from the recovery console or possibly from safe mode logged in as administrator. I would not play with it at all, except to say that a recovery console run of defrag or the file-and-folder tree fixer available from within the recovery console (aka scandisk) can work some with the metadata ina more safe way than any direct action by an admin can under about 90% of possible circumstances. A Fast Repair from the install CD is likely also to play with metadata stored here. Not only is the directory legit, it should be considered a hands-off directory unless you use tools that are available to manipulate it safely. A restore point recovery might also affect the metadata.

primesuspect

Cam: I know what you mean, we use a real piece of crap test bench computer, but it's great because we can just fire customer drives in and out of it without any worries. It's something like an Athlon 900 tbird on a KT7A with 256 mb of ram, but it sure does the job.

Stephen-Cassim

Camman wrote:

I was working on a damaged computer recently and I noticed this "System Volume Information" folder which was hidden and could not be opened because of Access is Denied error. I thought maybe it was part of the viruses and spyware problems on this particular PC, so I for the most part ignored it. I cleaned out all the spyware and viruses but the Windows installation was damaged so I needed to reinstall XP. I install the harddrive into my own PC to backup some emails and things like that.

Well I just noticed that on both my C:\ and F:\ secondary drive I now have a folder called "System Volume Information" that I can't open and it's hidden. Perhaps I just never noticed it before or maybe recently I un-hid hidden folders, I can't remember. But I don't remember the windows operating system having a System Volume folder that I wasn't ALLOWED to open.

Anyone have any ideas on this? Should I be concerned about a virus? I ran AVG and spybot but didn't find anything.

I've attached a screenshot.