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boot sector virus or hard drive.?. or demon?

R

RBBRMADE

Senior member
Here's the skinny.....

I only had a short time to look at their machine today. I will get back to it late tonite, but was wondering if anyone had any ideas to get my brain working....

This is what I know so far:

The machine is a 2001 HP with XP Home that will POST, but not boot to Windows.
The antivirus software was not updated when the machine stopped working.
The day the PC stopped, someone had DL'd and opened many emails. The PC froze up completely. They unplugged the PC from the wall and plugged it back in. It has not booted since. They were having occasional issues with the PC before this...lock ups, etc.

I ran a quick test on the HDD and it came back OK.
Memtest came back no errors.
PSU tests fine.
I removed and cleaned the fans, CPU and heatsink and fan, and put some fresh thermal paste on. There are no overheating issues.
I removed all optical drives, and extra PCI cards, same results.
It freezes at XP splash screen in normal mode, and freezes when listing Windows files in safe mode.

This is where it gets interesting.....

***I have a Bart's PE made Windows XP boot disk that will boot to it's desktop, but then freezes. It just comes up with wallpaper, and then stops. I know it is a good CD, btw.
When it stops with the Win Boot CD, the HDD light comes on for a second, and then goes off for a few seconds, repeatedly.

***The HDD has the HP recovery partition. If I select F10 at boot, the PC states '...system recovery started...' it shows another screen (can't remember what), and then comes to a light blue screen and stalls. The Hard Drive light does the same thing as described above.

***Here's the kicker....Knoppix boots and runs fine. Both partitions on the Hard Drive are seen and accessible. Files can be copied, viewed, etc...

I plan on running a more thorough test on the hard drive later. I would think if it was an issue with the MBR or FAT I would not see the XP boot screen...is that right?...

I have no experience with a boot sector virus, but this resembles some of the symptoms I have read about.

I will run a virus scan from DOS.

I also just thought of something else. I will try the Win Boot CD with the hard drive disconnected and see what happens. I bet it boots.....

Any ideas?


Thanx,
Ron

 
Hard Drive bad.
Recovery Console wold not recognize it.
I hooked it up to another PC via external USB, and it recognized it after about 2 minutes.
I ran a chkdsk on it there, and then placed it back in the original PC.
Recovery console saw it this time, I had to do another chkdsk, though, along with a fixmbr and fixboot to get it to boot to Windows.
The Recovery still would not work by F10 from start, but I was able to start it from Windows which sets it to automatically start at boot.
Recovery did not work first time, but did the second. I can now access the recovery partition via F10 at startup.
I am going to try to image the drive to a new one now.

Thought I'd let you know.....

Ron
 
Originally posted by: RBBRMADE
...
I ran a quick test on the HDD and it came back OK.
Memtest came back no errors.
PSU tests fine.
I removed and cleaned the fans, CPU and heatsink and fan, and put some fresh thermal paste on. There are no overheating issues.
I removed all optical drives, and extra PCI cards, same results.
It freezes at XP splash screen in normal mode, and freezes when listing Windows files in safe mode.

This is where it gets interesting.....
Click to expand...

You seem to know how to troubleshoot the problem so I am not sure how much help I can be.

Your second post states the hard drive is bad. Were you able to copy all of your data to another hard drive?

How did you test the PSU?

I have been meaning to ask you if you work with Newell-Rubbermaid or not.

Here are some links, just in case they may be helpful.

[*]Hard Drive Manufacturer Diagnostic Utilities
[*]Data Recovery Programs
[*]Rescue Disks
 
I was able to image sector for sector, and all looks good with the new HDD.

RBBRMADE was actually a name poking fun at my Chevy Avalanche with all the plastic on the bottom. That was on my tag, but changed it to CHNG4$1.

Nice list, BTW. I have or have tried most of it, but there are a few I need to play with.

Thanx,
Ron
 
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