PC totally Fubared

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I'm thinking of getting another 300GB drive to put in my server for full system backups... figured basic backups would do, never figured I'd loose an entire drive to a set of repetitious crashes that have no real cause.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Well I never figured out the problem. What I did was rebuild a new PC from scratch and use the parts from the "fried" one for my linux backup server, and it has not failed me yet, so somehow whatever the issue is only happends in windows.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
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 😉

There are CMOS viruses...rare though.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: RedSquirrel
Well I never figured out the problem. What I did was rebuild a new PC from scratch and use the parts from the "fried" one for my linux backup server, and it has not failed me yet, so somehow whatever the issue is only happends in windows.

Let's see. Permanently disable Windows memory NX-bit in boot.ini (XP SP2 only)? Latest chipset drivers? Reflash latest BIOS? Plug and Play management setting in BIOS? Hard drive cable/port/controller change? Try a PCI ATA card? Disable PIO/DMA and SMART? A reinstall didn't fix it?! Sorry if these have been suggested already. I'll fight the bastards for you. 😛 I hate script kiddies. Just looking at the ytmnd forums for a second made my eyes hurt.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yep tried reinstall, many times, it would just do it again. Even if I was a L3 tech this summer, flashing a bios is beyond my level of bravery. There's too many ways to screw up, ex: wrong mobo revision, etc. I rather play around in a plugged in PSU with a screw driver then flash my own bios. HDD was not an issue, did some intensive tests with the seagate util, same with the ram... really weird. And I don't even know if it's a virus or any type of malicious code, I just found it very suspicious that it hit me the first time when I was at that ytmnd site, which had attacked one of my sites a bit before the incident. (I gave them lot of legal threats, shutted down one of their forums, etc).

But whatever it is, I'm just very scared it returns. I got a BSOD the other day and I nearly cried, thinking it hit my new machine, but thankfully after hitting reset it booted up into windows, and did not pull off the C drive not found thing on me.

And the backup server which is using all that hardware has done TONS of data processing (main thing that triggered the BSOD) with no issues. Same drive, ram, etc. + more drives.

So this will most likely remain a huge IT mystery.