XP wont boot

[Play_The_0dds]

hot topic lately. i got a HP Pavilion 531w in yesturday, 1.3 celery 265 sdram, 40 seagate hd. would either get to the loading xp sceen and freeze(not to the welcome screen) or if in safe mode would start to load and freeze. being this is a hot topic i decided to spend some time and try to save the system. could not repair from cd, pulled the hard drive out, slaved it to my personal system. virus scans found and removed backdoor.v.b.9.n, (the next three have several varients i will not list all of)donwloader.dyfica A,AA,AC...................
downloader.tuown.A,.................
downloader.istbar.AM,AE.........................
and stubby.A
checked over everything while i had it hooked to my machine, removed spyware such as gain, sextracker,couple different search bars and thousands of cookies. finnaly got the system to boot on it's own. now every program has problems, repairs seemed to be hit or miss, repaired windows,installed programs and missing files still i felt i was a 3rd class passenger on the titanic. a little over 6 hours in and i still had a corrupt system. went to hp downloaded the sp1 patch for the system restore, did two online virus scans, symantec, then panda, panda found a varient of netsky(skynet) been reading the news, dont know what they want it called. anyway, run the full system recovery that comes on-board hp computers after i had complete backups of all the owners stuff. now the system was fine. if i had done a full erase and recovered to begin with it would have takin 2-3 hours to be done, only problem the system restore for the copy of xp and the software bundle was on the infected drive. note to readers, if you buy a computer, make sure it has a full operating system recovery cd with it, not one that depends on files being stored on a partition on the drive(compaq was bad about that) or the operating system oem cd. if you call hp they will send you a recovery disk set for about $10 usa, but some people complain that if the machine is a couple years old they dont offer them anymore.
total time i spent on this, 10 hours and 43 minutes.
if i had done a secure erase and reinstalled, could have been start to finnish 2-3 hours.

[snowmonkey]

And that's why I keep an image of my working opertating system in a saparet drive all the time,, once a while when I feel that I have installed bunch of stuff that I want to keep and my system is clean that I image it,,,, Virus can't touch the image file (yet).

my ½ cents worth

cheers

[Play_The_0dds]

i make a image of my personal systems once a month, backup files once a week, the average user never plans for disaster, only people with a good knowledge of windows know it is disaster waiting to happen. just a story i like to tell: guy bought a hp with windows 98, came with McAfee v sheild anti virus, 2 years later he starts calling me asking why his computer does "this", does "that" i suggest it's a virus. but he assures me he does not have a virus, he has "protection". well i end up having go out there because he wont bring it in and he points out the vshield logo as the computer boots which proudly stated "you are protected". well after removing the who's who of viruses from his computer repaired the damage, installed a up-2-date anti virus he wasnt so proud of those logos no more.

[snowmonkey]

Dude, you are absolutely right. you know what,, I do this for living and I know where you are coming from ,, I'm not afraid of average users screwing their computer,, I scared of those people who actually think they do know what they are doing because they have few university degrees hanging from their walls .........



cheers