I tried asking about this elsewhere but was not able to get any help, also I know this will sound like a malware issue at first but it's more of a booting issue.
I was downloading a file when Windows Defender gave me an alert and I noticed that my browser reported an issue with the download, and when I looked at defender it was a .tmp file. I figured ok, it probably found something in the download and didn't even let it complete, I will just tell it to delete the file as it's not important, but when I went to Sefender it didn't have the usual options, it only had the option to reboot claiming it needed to do that to clean the infection. This confused me since I had never seen Defender so that before, plus the file I was downloading was not an executable but a compressed archive that I had not even opened, much less executed anything, so there should not have been a realistic chance for anything to try to infect me.
Worried rebooting might cause further issues and having some work I needed to finish up I tried to launch Eset's free scanner, but when it started taking more than an hour I decided to just click the reboot button on Defender, which didn't seem to reboot, so I shut down the system instead.
Just to be safe, before booting the system up again I decided to use another system to setup a Ventoy USB drive with several bootable virus scanners on it (So few options for these anymore in 2024 in the US, a lot of those lists of recommended ones are very out of date even though they claim it was just updated, recommending scanners like Eset whose bootable version is now dead, ones that have not been updated since 2020, or not allowed in the US anymore like Kapsersky). Not all of them would boot properly, and unfortunately, one of the ones I tried was Panda. It looked like it was working but then I just had a black screen that was stuck there for a while, I figured it was not working and just moved on the to the others. To my surprise though the others then claimed they did not find a valid Windows install, even the offline Windows Defender, even though I could browse the drive just fine if I booted into a live Linux distro.
It was at this point that I found out that Panda's bootable scanner actually works in a very different way from other scanners. Unlike just about every other bootable scanner which starts up either a Linux or Windows live environment, Panda apparently installs a bootable application on your Windows drive that will start next boot in place of Windows and run the scan.
So now I have no idea if because of Panda I have destroyed my Windows install or not. If Panda screwed up when it was attempting to install it's nonsensical method of putting itself on your boot drive in place of Windows since it was stuck at a black screen, if it succeeded, or if it didn't do anything at all and Windows might either try to boot normally or attempt a scan next boot, and if I would just reboot the system and see what happens, or attempt to boot into a Windows install USB and run the diagnostic tools to try to repair my boot... or if attempting to do that would screw it up even more, assuming it is even screwed up. Also a slight worry that somehow I did get infected and it will go off next reboot, but again, I am about 95% or so sure I didn't actually get infected with anything as I didn't run any sort of executable file (and the very few scanners I was able to run off he Ventoy disk, pretty much just Comodo, didn't find anything).
Any recommendations on how I can check what the state of my system's boot might be before trying to boot it? And what my next course of action should be?
I was downloading a file when Windows Defender gave me an alert and I noticed that my browser reported an issue with the download, and when I looked at defender it was a .tmp file. I figured ok, it probably found something in the download and didn't even let it complete, I will just tell it to delete the file as it's not important, but when I went to Sefender it didn't have the usual options, it only had the option to reboot claiming it needed to do that to clean the infection. This confused me since I had never seen Defender so that before, plus the file I was downloading was not an executable but a compressed archive that I had not even opened, much less executed anything, so there should not have been a realistic chance for anything to try to infect me.
Worried rebooting might cause further issues and having some work I needed to finish up I tried to launch Eset's free scanner, but when it started taking more than an hour I decided to just click the reboot button on Defender, which didn't seem to reboot, so I shut down the system instead.
Just to be safe, before booting the system up again I decided to use another system to setup a Ventoy USB drive with several bootable virus scanners on it (So few options for these anymore in 2024 in the US, a lot of those lists of recommended ones are very out of date even though they claim it was just updated, recommending scanners like Eset whose bootable version is now dead, ones that have not been updated since 2020, or not allowed in the US anymore like Kapsersky). Not all of them would boot properly, and unfortunately, one of the ones I tried was Panda. It looked like it was working but then I just had a black screen that was stuck there for a while, I figured it was not working and just moved on the to the others. To my surprise though the others then claimed they did not find a valid Windows install, even the offline Windows Defender, even though I could browse the drive just fine if I booted into a live Linux distro.
It was at this point that I found out that Panda's bootable scanner actually works in a very different way from other scanners. Unlike just about every other bootable scanner which starts up either a Linux or Windows live environment, Panda apparently installs a bootable application on your Windows drive that will start next boot in place of Windows and run the scan.
So now I have no idea if because of Panda I have destroyed my Windows install or not. If Panda screwed up when it was attempting to install it's nonsensical method of putting itself on your boot drive in place of Windows since it was stuck at a black screen, if it succeeded, or if it didn't do anything at all and Windows might either try to boot normally or attempt a scan next boot, and if I would just reboot the system and see what happens, or attempt to boot into a Windows install USB and run the diagnostic tools to try to repair my boot... or if attempting to do that would screw it up even more, assuming it is even screwed up. Also a slight worry that somehow I did get infected and it will go off next reboot, but again, I am about 95% or so sure I didn't actually get infected with anything as I didn't run any sort of executable file (and the very few scanners I was able to run off he Ventoy disk, pretty much just Comodo, didn't find anything).
Any recommendations on how I can check what the state of my system's boot might be before trying to boot it? And what my next course of action should be?
Facebook
Twitter