[Fr33m4n]

Diggin through my drawer i found an old 2GB usb stick that I had gotten at work some time ago. I plugged it into my machine and discovered it contained a few old work documents. Since none of it was essential I decided to reformat the drive. I left the name as "untitled" and proceded to format it as fat32. What happened next is complete mystery.

The drive somehow formated itself into two partitions where one was a 500mb hidden unaccessible partition with the name "untitled" and the other partition was 1.5GB and had named itself "arid in Pes". I then opened the "arid in Pes" partition and was surprised to see that it contained 81 files all of which was 0 kb in size and no extension but had different file names. If you read through the list of files you could make out fragments of sentances spanning several files. It was really wierd. I'm attatching two screenshot of the files.

So what do you guys think this is? A virus or a cleverly hidden message?

Attached File(s)

•  Screen shot 2010-06-04 at 12.05.19 AM.png (55.2K)
  Number of downloads: 54
•  Screen shot 2010-06-04 at 12.05.41 AM.png (31.01K)
  Number of downloads: 49

[5eraph]

It seems more likely that, in the course of formatting the USB stick, the location of the file allocation table was changed to overlap what was once the contents of a text file. What you are seeing were the previous contents of that text file.

[Fr33m4n]

That would be amazing, but seriously, what's the odds of something like that happening? I can't quite think of which text file it would be either. The contents sound more like something out of a novel really.

[Fr33m4n]

I reformated a second time. This time I only got one partition but the partition was still named "arid in pes" and it appears to have the same 0 kb files all over. Strange.

[iamtheky]

what are you formatting with, have you tried a third party utility? maybe sdelete everything on it then format it.

[puntoMX]

Fr33m4n, on 03 June 2010 - 04:14 PM, said:

So what do you guys think this is? A virus or a cleverly hidden message?

A Virus (that did his work) or a half dead USB thump-drive that doesn't let you format it well. Now, remove the partitions with disk-manager and remove the drive from the PC, plug it back in and make a new partition, format it with fat32 or NTFS or so. now, let's see what happens.

[DigeratiPrime]

I was going to suggest erasing the disk with diskpart cmd or disk management mmc, but it looks like your using osx.

[Tripredacus]

DigeratiPrime, on 07 June 2010 - 07:39 PM, said:

I was going to suggest erasing the disk with diskpart cmd or disk management mmc, but it looks like your using osx.

Or WindowBlinds. I can make my Win98 PC look like that too.

PuntoMX said:

half dead USB thump-drive

[TheWalrus]

I would try the HP USB format tool.

[dencorso]

No. Use the free version of Active@ Kill Disk to fully zero it out. Then repartition and reformat. And let's see what happens. In case the pendrive is OK, this will get it pristine once again.

[puntoMX]

Tripredacus, on 08 June 2010 - 08:25 AM, said:

PuntoMX said:

half dead USB thump-drive

I wasn't joking, there is more to it than 1 and 0. What I mend was: You can access the drive but can't set some bits to 0 again. (that LoL sign is on the wrong side of the screen )

[Tripredacus]

puntoMX, on 10 June 2010 - 10:58 AM, said:

Tripredacus, on 08 June 2010 - 08:25 AM, said:

PuntoMX said:

half dead USB thump-drive

I wasn't joking, there is more to it than 1 and 0. What I mend was: You can access the drive but can't set some bits to 0 again. (that LoL sign is on the wrong side of the screen )

Thump thump

[iamtheky]

not with your signature