@KinkyWinks
I took the computer to the shop along with a 4 year old one that was giving me problems. The guy couldn't help on the lost stories but did install a new hard drive in the older computer.
A "Dirty little secret" of many computer repair shops, in particular with the big chains, like Best Buy, is very few of their people are particularly skilled at what they do. To the point where they probably don't know much more than you do.
They've been given a set up utilities to run/install on a computer, and the follow the instructions said utilities provide them. Beyond that, "it must be a hardware issue." Even for the shops where the tech may be more skilled, they may not be allowed or otherwise inclined to go the extra mile to assist.
IF you want data recovery(that takes longer than a few minutes//running a couple basic utilities), rather than recovery (of use) of your computer, you're going to have to dig for someone who can truly assist, and be willing to pay for it, as they won't be cheap.
The computer has McAfee anti virus. {U}What I clicked on was a Yahoo Page news story about Ellen DeGeneres.{/U} The screen immediately changed to the lock down.
This is part of the "practice safe HEX" expression some computer/tech experts will allude to. Having an Anti-Virus program and firewall running will only protect you so far.
The end-user is still fully capable of letting infectious material through on their own. Be it through malware, ActiveX security exploits in Windows Explorer, or javascript popups that do things other than what their buttons say they will.
As to what happened, you probably clicked on a news aggregate link on yahoo news, which then took you to a third party site that is probably clean 99.9% of the time, but you happened to catch it during the 0.01% of the time when a hacker has managed to slip an undetected/unreported exploit into one the advertiser streams for that page, which is where things went wrong for you.
That is how most websites end up getting "compromised" as the site itself remains secure, it was the advertiser that dropped the ball and introduced the malicious code on the page, during that particular "hit."
The "Safe Hex" approach is to distrust any unexpected prompts that pop up, in particular any that start screaming about "certain kinds of activity" unless you are 100% certain that you know where it came from. (Checking active windows can help on that, if you're supposedly getting a warning from McCaffe about a virus infection, but the window that's open belongs to your web browser, chances are someone is phishing and you need to find a way to close that window without otherwise interacting with it.)
After that's done, you might want get into the real McCaffey and let it check your system over to be sure. The hackers are getting very good at the social engineering game, and making people click on things that will be harmful to them. If you find something that pops up suspicious, don't click on it, kill it by other means.
