bfindlay
2006-09-28, 04:20
OK, - I am officially in computer hell! I picked up the virusblast (and other) malware bugs a few weeks ago by downloading the codec foolishly. I cleared out most of them with spybot, but one remained. Could not find it.
I have two hard drives in my system, and I bought another one - a large capacity drive from Seagate.
During the course of this, I flashed my BIOS (was trying to enable a newer CPU I had purchased). First flash went fine, then found a 'newer one' on intel's stie and tried it. IT flashed from Windows, rather than using the boot cd. All hell broke loose - computer would not boot, BIOS appeared corrupted, and it took me some time before I could even re-flash the BIOS back to an earlier (working )state. Finally did that.
Knowing my hard drives were infected, I disable the master, boot drive, attached the new virgin drive, and booted from the Windows CD - installed windows. Computer was totally sluggish, and after a few minutes I got a popup saying that '55 registry errors found - download from regfixit.com to cure the problem'. This was the same kind of extortion ware message I had been getting from Virusblast and others after installing.
So, I detached all drives but the new one. Took out the cmos chip on the mboard, waited an hour - shorted the leads (to drain the capacitors and ensure the BIOS contained nothing). Re-flashed the BIOS. Inserted the Windows CD, and deleted the partitions and reformatted the new drive. Installed windows - BANG - download from regfixit to cure! Same extortion ware popup.
So this thing lives either in BIOS or as a boot sector virus. I am presently running dban (from dban.sourceforge.net) and it supposedly writes zeros all over the disk - including the boot sector. A long process with a 320G drive!
After that I will attempt to install windows again. Assuming I am successfull and get a clean machine - how can I get the 100+ G of data off the two older (infected) drives. Is there a way to completely secure this machine - lock it down - so that I can connect these drives, get the files I need off them, and then wipe them clean? The loss of use of the computer for a week is galling. The idea of buying a new computer to solve this problem vexing, but the loss of years of data (which seems fine - just lives on an infected disk) - that is devastating!
ADVthanksANCE for any insights you can give me on this.
I have two hard drives in my system, and I bought another one - a large capacity drive from Seagate.
During the course of this, I flashed my BIOS (was trying to enable a newer CPU I had purchased). First flash went fine, then found a 'newer one' on intel's stie and tried it. IT flashed from Windows, rather than using the boot cd. All hell broke loose - computer would not boot, BIOS appeared corrupted, and it took me some time before I could even re-flash the BIOS back to an earlier (working )state. Finally did that.
Knowing my hard drives were infected, I disable the master, boot drive, attached the new virgin drive, and booted from the Windows CD - installed windows. Computer was totally sluggish, and after a few minutes I got a popup saying that '55 registry errors found - download from regfixit.com to cure the problem'. This was the same kind of extortion ware message I had been getting from Virusblast and others after installing.
So, I detached all drives but the new one. Took out the cmos chip on the mboard, waited an hour - shorted the leads (to drain the capacitors and ensure the BIOS contained nothing). Re-flashed the BIOS. Inserted the Windows CD, and deleted the partitions and reformatted the new drive. Installed windows - BANG - download from regfixit to cure! Same extortion ware popup.
So this thing lives either in BIOS or as a boot sector virus. I am presently running dban (from dban.sourceforge.net) and it supposedly writes zeros all over the disk - including the boot sector. A long process with a 320G drive!
After that I will attempt to install windows again. Assuming I am successfull and get a clean machine - how can I get the 100+ G of data off the two older (infected) drives. Is there a way to completely secure this machine - lock it down - so that I can connect these drives, get the files I need off them, and then wipe them clean? The loss of use of the computer for a week is galling. The idea of buying a new computer to solve this problem vexing, but the loss of years of data (which seems fine - just lives on an infected disk) - that is devastating!
ADVthanksANCE for any insights you can give me on this.