In a shop run by a friend, and he said his machine was behaving oddly. To his surprise, he had a 120G drive, but from the windows disk utility, there was only 30 in a partion, Drive C, and the rest as unallocated space. He did not know how this had happened or when, but was fairly sure it had not been bought set up like this. He is also getting notices on the screen that memory dumps are happening. He is firewalled and anti virused and updated. But he doesn't have specific anti spyware.

Question: have you ever heard of anything like this happening as the result of an infection?

Is it a reasonable investigative first step to boot from a live Linux CD and find out if it shows up as unallocated space in that too?

And what would you then advise using to see if the space really is unallocated and with nothing in it? I have system rescue CD, and could get any of the other security oriented distros, but this isn't really my area....

Peter