changed drive letter, now drive won;t open

This is a bizarre one. I've searched and searched on the internet but can find no answers that work.
I reinstalled Vista on my laptop, and found my external hard drives had swapped drive letter in the process. I have progs that rely on correct drive letter, and so decided to simply change the drive letter, as I have done before, in admin tools.
I then found that the two external HDDs lost the icons that came with them (one is a maxtor, if you're familiar with it). Also, neither drive would open when double clicked.
I can use explore to view the files, and all files seem accessible, but yet, if I double click, nothing.
Well, I say nothing. I noticed that when i unplugged and then replugged the drive, I got the autostart that offered at the top to install or run software.
That seemed a little peculiar to me.
In task manager, I then noticed that whenever the drive is double clicked a process starts that looks suspicious.
It is: "S-5-1-15-100016573-100006507-100019169-4898.com"
I did a google on it but nothing came up.
I've run a virus scan (Kasperski), but nothing has come up, and yet, I don't ever remember this process showing up before, certainly when the drive has been plugged in and the autorun started.

I've tried a few solutions for similar problems, one involving deleting the autorun.inf file off the HDD, but i couldn;t actually find the autorun.inf to delete, and some reg fixes, but none worked.

I initially thought it was a problem with my laptop, but then I tried one of the HDDs in my PC, and it was the same there - no opening with a double click.

Obviously then it's something to do with the drive.

I'm stumped. Half the time I think it's a virus, the other half, that it's somthing to do with assigning the new drive letter. It did start, after all, right after asigning the new drive letter. I have a suspicion it IS a virus, and that when I double click to open, it;s activating this strange S-5-1-15-100016573-100006507-100019169-4898.com thing instead of accessing the file structure. But I'm surprised it doesn;t show up on a Google, nor a virus scan.

Anyone got any ideas?

 

Have you tried copying a file from the drive down to your system drive, and then opening it there?

 

I am guessing when you installed the os both externals were connected, yes?

So you did a reinstall of the os then the programs dependant on the external drive? Sorry it's late...

A friend of mine had something along the same lines and the external was bad, are you able to connect the drives to another pc and explore the files?

 

Hi, thanks for the help.
Yes, I reinstalled the OS, with HDs attatched, and they were assigned wrongly by Vista. I installed Videostudio to complete a movie I was making, and all the video files used by video studio were now unlinked. I've had this problem before, but then just reassigned the drive letters to the externals in Vista - no problem.
THis time, as soon as I'd assigned the new drive letters, I found that I couldn;t open them in my computer.
I can use explore to open the drives, and the files on them are okay. If I plug the drives into another computer, I find the same problem - can;t open with double click.
When I do double click on the drives, and they don;t open, I notice in task manager that the process "S-5-1-15-100016573-100006507-100019169-4898.com" starts to run.
I ran spybot last night after posting here, and this comes up with an infection on both drives: a trojan which I forget the name of. I used spybot to fix it, which it did.

Hey presto, both disks open now, and no mysterious processes running when I open them.

Oh, I also turned off system restore, in case there was a backup of the trojan lurking there.

So, all is well in the world - well, until the next time.

Many thanks for the help.

All the best.

 

Great find, thanks for the update and glad you got them working!
Good information...