• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

PC totally Fubared

Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
Ok this is really bad. I got a virus from ytmn.com, that forum attacked one of my sites so I've been fighting them and such, and somehow a virus in a thread there got past firefox and nailed my machine to corruption. AVG did not catch it. I still can't confirm that it was a virus, but to me it's quite suspicious if I was browsing threads then suddently I start getting corruption errors, 1 exe at a time until my PC was unusable.

So I reloaded an acronis image, then later on I'm copying stuff from my external hard drive, the computer reboots for no reason and the C drive is corrupted again, so I reload the acronis image, then after that I continue doing what I was doing and bang, I get nailed again, this time 100's of errors like this one referencing to system applications.

stupid_error.jpg


I posted a thread about this error, but I'm starting this one since it seems to be a much more serious issue that I'm having now, especially if my C drive gets corrupted multiple times in the same day. I di d not even bother trying again, I quit until someone can give me an answer on how to fix this.

WTF would do this though? Is there a way to stop this? It's obviously hardware level, and so far the memtest is showing the memory is fine, so I don't think it's the memory...
 
Oh great... and I just installed that drive... I have an acrylic case, so installing drives is a PIA, not to mention the expense this is going to involve...

Now do I check an NTFS partition for bad clusters? I just realized I've never done that before since I never had a need to. scandisk wont work since dos does not support ntfs...
 
Open up the console (run cmd.exe), and execute "chkdsk C: /R", answer Y when it asks if you want to run chkdsk next reboot.

You can also run chkdsk from the recovery console.
 
Thanks I'll try that.

Another thing I noticed, sometimes when I reboot, it just brings me to the bios. Also I forgot to mention most of the crashes, when I rebooted (or after it did it by itself) it would lock me to the blue asus screen. I had to keep unplugging and plugging back the machine until it actually gets past that screen, then it would bring me to the bios saying the cpu settings are not right. (using presets, and not custom)
 
Hmm just thought of something. My UPS has been letting me down lately, when there's an outage it won't switch fast enough to the battery so my system just freezes. Could that have caused a PSU issue which is now screwing up the whole PC? But it only crashes when I'm transfering stuff though, or doing any type of processing, so not sure why a power issue would kick in but figured I'd mention that.
 
You might try pulling the battery on your motherboard to reset the BIOS. The virus may have corrupted your BIOS info. I haven't heard of any viruses that targeted the BIOS for years, but you never know.

You could also boot to a Windows 98 startup disk, run fdisk /mbr and then use fdisk to erase your partitions and then reload your disk image.
 
Just deleted the C drive with spfdisk, then loading up the acronis image.... but in acronis the C drive (unallowcated) was showing up UNDER the D drive, so that really bothers me... I hope the data is not overwriting my D drive. I've seen this happen before, where it screws up the partition ordering.
 
This is freaken rediculous. AGAIN it crashes. AGAIN while trying to transfer those stupid wav files. that has got to be done some day.. geeze. (it's not illegal sound - it's speeches, but I don't think win2k checks for that anyway)

So I opened up firefox to browse the net while it's transfering, since while I was in panic I just brought my external hdd downstairs to transfer it on the network, so when I reimaged I grabbed the last few wavs from the network to put them on my D drive... then all of a sudden it says this: "The file or directory C: is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the chkdsk utility"

Well chkdsk does nothing, it just says everything is ok and exits, even if I do a force, it still says everything is ok.

What next? This is driving me up the wall. I should just order new parts and build a new PC, I have a feeling I'll be stuck on this for a while...
 
Stupid thing died again. It just rebooted, then went stuck on the Asus screen, so I turned it off then back on, this time I got "missing operating system" and the whole C drive is corrupted, so yet again I'm restoring the image. This is realy stupid.

Actually, is there a virus going around maybe that would do this? since it's quite a coincidence because my work PC has been doing the EXACT same thing, and it too, has a 200GB hard drive configured about the same way, one partition for OS, one for data.
 
Stupid thing died again. It just rebooted, then went stuck on the Asus screen, so I turned it off then back on, this time I got "missing operating system" and the whole C drive is corrupted, so yet again I'm restoring the image. This is realy stupid.

Actually, is there a virus going around maybe that would do this? since it's quite a coincidence because my work PC has been doing the EXACT same thing, and it too, has a 200GB hard drive configured about the same way, one partition for OS, one for data.

Edit: Just reimaged to see what had a chance to transfer, and it looks like it crashed at the EXACT SAME FILE as before. It's just a normal wav file, why is it doing this to me? It's not even corrupted or anything, I can play it directly off the external drive, and it copied fine on the other machine.
 
Try running Memtest86+ on the system too. Way way too many problems going on there.


And maybe try running Prime95's torture test on the PC for a few hours (or until it errors out) while in Safe Mode.
 
Here's the full specs of the system:


Motherboard: Asus a7v600
cpu: AMD athlon XP 2700+ (stock speed)
Ram: 2 x 512 Kinston (I believe one is 2700 and the other is 2100 - but it has been this way for long, so they are just both running at 2100)
PSU: startech 450Watt, been using these PSUs on more then one PC, they're no high end brand but never had any serious issues on any machines that use it, including a server.
HDD: 200GB Seagate drive, almost new (less than a year) it was in my full production linux server, and I never had any issues, it was being used unpartitioned and it's been near full at some points, with no corruption at all.

The system is custom built, and while I've changed things here and there, nothing major before this horrible death trap time bomb issue.

Today, it crashed again, but this time instead of loosing my C drive, I lost my D drive, which has all my data... due to the high volume of data, I had only had the chance to backup the most important... so I'm really hoping there's some kind of free tool to recover lost partitions.

right now I'm doing a full cluster test on the drive with spfdisk. I'll get the seagate util and try it out too, but I don't want to stress the drive too much until I can find something to recover the D drive. I'll have to image it over to another drive or something but before it crashed I was doing some tests and filled it right up and all the things I did that caused the crashes before, never triggered a crash, until later on I was just surfing the net and suddently i got errors that D was corrupted until my whole system was unresponsive and I had to reboot, did not loose C that time. Right now I can still boot windows, but D is missing... in SPFdisk I get an error that the partition got cut, but I still can't find any utility that would fix that. 🙁 I hate searching for that type of stuff since it's all gimicks, it runs then asks for money to restore.


Also, would it be technically possible for a web based virus that exploits firefox, to cause such catastrophe? I was browsing a forum that's been in war with one of my forums, and both crashes - the first and the last, occured while I was browsing that site. Quite a coincidence, really... but thing is, if it is them, I'll have trouble proving that to authorities, since I would guess the virus is targeted to my IP or userid only.


Also, could all these issues, on my work machine, and here be caused by the 137GB limitation windows has? Since both PCs have 200GB drives... one at work is a maxtor (did a surface scan over the long weekend, came clean) and mine is a seagate.
 
What you describe is more in line with the side effects of a crummy generic power supply getting ready to bite the dust, rather than a virus. Think about it... a virus that stops your motherboard from making it through its POST initialization? Uhhh... I don't think so 😉

If it were me, my next step would be to replace the off-brand power supply with something decent, preferably ATX 2.0-compliant so you're ready for your next upgrade too. Antec TruePower 2.0 in the 430-550W range depending how future-proof you want to be, or something from Fortron/Sparkle, Enermax or Seasonic. You forgot to list your video card and some GPUs pull as much power as your AthlonXP does, so I still don't have a complete picture of your power needs.

On the virus tangent, what do you have for...

[*]Windows version and Service Pack (example: WinXP Pro with SP2 or whatever)
[*]Antivirus software, brand and exact version
[*]Firewall software
[*]Firewall hardware (ie, a router)
[*]If you have wireless, what encryption are you running?
[*]Do you use a Limited account when browsing these risky sites, or do you use a Computer Administrator account? (hint: right answer is "naturally I use Limited! Duh!! 😛")
 
-Using win2k with SP4 and tiny personal firewall
-linksys router with tight security, as tight as the options allow me to, which is limited, but gets the job done in terms of port attacks (no open ports)
- AVG antivirus, updated daily (engine + dats)
- no wireless access
- my account has admin rights, though I don't know if this would change anything since even as a limited user a well programmed virus will just make sure to run as administrator, or something.

I was thinking the PSU but all the voltages are stable, and I've used this brand on many PCs, including a server. It's really hard to get name brand stuff here, I just get whatever is available on my canadian suppliers, which is limited compared to US sites like newegg, etc.

I still can't see how a PSU can cause data corruption, not without permanently damaging the drive, anyway, and the drive is working fine. If it was bad, re-imaging would not work.
 
- AVG antivirus, updated daily (engine + dats)
Click to expand...
From AV-Comparatives.org's February 05 comparative:

Script viruses

AVG Professional: 31% detected
Kaspersky: 97.9% detected

Trojans

AVG Professional: 45.6% detected
Kaspersky: 98.6% detected

Worms

AVG Professional: 90% detected
Kaspersky: 99.6% detected

Can I suggest you invest in some better antivirus software than AVG 🙂

my account has admin rights, though I don't know if this would change anything since even as a limited user a well programmed virus will just make sure to run as administrator, or something.
Click to expand...
Not so easy.
I still can't see how a PSU can cause data corruption, not without permanently damaging the drive, anyway, and the drive is working fine. If it was bad, re-imaging would not work.
Click to expand...
What's your hard drive, memory and everything else run on? Electricity. Where's the electricity come from? Yeah yeah, you think the voltages are stable. 😛 Well, keep fighting it then.
 
But if the voltages arn't stable would't asus probe show this? or is that not accurate? I blew the fuse in my amp/volt meter so can't check manually unfortunatly... forgot to bypass the fuse when testing a high amperage circuit...

But my main concern now is getting my data back, know of any free dos based apps that will do a scan to detect lost partitions? sort of like what winternals ERD does? I did back it up, but only the most important stuff, before I got around to backing up the entire 100Gigs of data it crapped out again...

All this just happened randomly too, I've been using this PSU for years so that's why I'm doubting it's that, unless I blew something in it causing it to be unstable all of a sudden. It's also on a UPS, but lately that UPS has been switching over to battery too slowly, so power outages usually make my PC reboot... so maybe it did get damaged, we've had a few wind storm/power outages lately. I shut everything off and unplug the main lines when there's lightning though.

The most recent change though (abotu a month ago) is the video card, it's a nvidia Gforce TI 2100 (or something like that, it was given to me without any docs or drivers and it just says asus on it) He had it running on a lower end 420w psu fine though... But maybe with the cold cathode lights and such I'm drawing more power. But I know last time I checked my PC draws a bit over 200w out of the wall.
 
Originally posted by: RedSquirrel

- my account has admin rights, though I don't know if this would change anything since even as a limited user a well programmed virus will just make sure to run as administrator, or something.
Click to expand...

Elevating privileges requires a bit of a brain while exploiting clueless admin users (not necessarily you) doesn't. 😉

I still can't see how a PSU can cause data corruption, not without permanently damaging the drive, anyway, and the drive is working fine. If it was bad, re-imaging would not work.
Click to expand...

I was skeptical about the PSU causing issues like this too, but I've read thread after thread where the issues were solved with a decent PSU at mechBgon's direction. 😉
 
All I'm going to say is that it sounds to me like a mobo or PSU getting flaky. A lot of my 20000-ish posts are derived from helping people troubleshoot stuff, and the symptoms you describe fit that theory better than mystery viruses that make your mobo intermittently fail to complete POST.

The Memtest86 idea is good too, try that when you get a chance. As far as data recovery... lessee here... 😛 believe I heard high praise for these guys: http://www.r-studio.com/ Hope that helps! 🙂
 
Yep tried memtest, no bad ram, doing a full seagate diagnostic scan right now. Would be nice if they had recovery software too, all I really need is basic partition recovery, since spfdisk erroed out saying the partition is "cut" so I bet just rebuilding the partition table would get my data back... I have a few spare PSUs downstairs so it's worth trying at least, though I hate this whole situation because the PC is now just a time bomb waiting to blow up, maybe it will be days this time before it crashes, giving me time to build up progress on my OS drive, only for it to crash again.

ordered new parts to build a new PC, so at least once I build a new one I'll have a main box... but this whole situation will sooo put me behind with everything, and I already am behind with everything due to other issues before all this.
 
When you get it back on its feet again, and go to "war" with those villains at the other forum again, can I suggest try a 30-day trial of Kaspersky Antivirus Personal 5 ( http://www.kaspersky.com/trials ) with the Extended Databases (in the Threats & Exclusions panel). Also try this: Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer. Bet you a :cookie: it'll find ways you can tighten up your Win2000/etc.

Heck, or taking a page from the brighter :light:'s around here, maybe boot from a Knoppix CD to browse the enemy's forum with, if you think they're dishing out Windows viruses to you 😉
 
Yeah I'll probably install linux in a VM and use that... and in windows I'll stick to text based browsers I think... What is a better free A/V then AVG though? I don't want to pay per year, since most AVs you have to pay per year to get updates.

But it might be the PSU as well... but I don't want to start replacing one part at once and wait for a crash, risking all my data again, if I even manage to recover it.
 
Don't cut off your nose to spite your face here 😉 some things are worth paying for, including high-end antivirus software. Just based on what your data is worth to you, $35 for a year of top-notch antivirus protection for it is a small price to pay. Eh? If you didn't know this, Kaspersky issues 24 virus-definition updates per day to keep the window of opportunity to a minimum. Not a bad way to spend $3 per month, methinks.

but I don't want to start replacing one part at once and wait for a crash, risking all my data again, if I even manage to recover it.
Click to expand...
You got to start somewhere. Bail the dying UPS too. Sounds to me like it's time to spend what it costs to stay in the game, and that might include a backup solution such as an external drive that has the capacity to hold your data.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top