Nasty Virus?

[WAD62]

On Friday morning I booted up my PC (home built, running XP SP2 with AVG 2011), on bootup I was greeted with half a screen, the bottom half having been completely obscured by a huge green flashing 'Start' button, without the start logo.

I was able to drag the offending 'green thing' back down to a regular task bar size, but could not recover the task bar itself. Although basic functionality was still there.

Other symptoms were that I couldn't run disk defragmentor, which is very unusual.

I ran AVG scan, and eventually ended up with a 'blue screen of death' hardware error message, similar happened when I ran 'malwarebytes'.

I was away at the weekend, so I decided to rebuild my machine yesterday. The first time I attempted to perform a 'deep format' it got to 100% and then stopped stating that the drive was damaged, on the second attempt it went through perfectly...and I've now got things back to where I want them.

I can now run virus scans perfectly well, and with no problems.

Has anyone else experienced these symptoms, it's as if it were some form of inter sector virus on the disk (hence the 2 formats cleared it), or a coincidence of a virus and a dodgy HD. :scratch:

[Tony Moore]

Hi Will,

My first thought would be a hardware glitch of some sort, most likely the disk drive. Can you interrogate the SMART data and see if it's reporting any errors?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_S.M.A.R.T._tools

Ive not used any of these but maybe there's a free one on there that would enable you to read the drive SMART info and see if it's reporting high failure rates.

Cheers,
Tony

[WAD62]

Hi Will,

My first thought would be a hardware glitch of some sort, most likely the disk drive. Can you interrogate the SMART data and see if it's reporting any errors?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_S.M.A.R.T._tools

Ive not used any of these but maybe there's a free one on there that would enable you to read the drive SMART info and see if it's reporting high failure rates.

Cheers,
Tony

Cheers for that Tony, I'm giving HD Tune Pro a whirl, it's got a 15 day trial...

My current system drive is a 6 month old Seagate 160 5.6k so I'd be surprised, but it's no fun doing these rebuilds so worth a check...

There were a few internet reports of virus/task bar issues but nothing that met my symptoms. It's also hard to work out how it could still function with a system HD failure, albeit with a messed up task bar!

I'll report back... :)

EDIT; System disk test reports 100% perfect, so whatever interrupted the first format was removed by the second one :)

[Beechwoods]

I would take it at the very least as a warning of likely hard drive problems down the line. Retire your current drive to inessential duties and get a new one in as the main one!

[aquapiranha]

I am with Tony one this one. I would first try something like Smart UDM to view the smart file and if not run some generic diags such as Eurosoft's PC Check.

[WAD62]

I would take it at the very least as a warning of likely hard drive problems down the line. Retire your current drive to inessential duties and get a new one in as the main one!

Hi Nick,

That's my usual tack, and because of that all my data resides on other drives, I only hold the program files and swap file on the system disk.

It's rebuilt now so no going back, until the next issue anyway, but the task bar/start button issue is not indicative of an HD failure, my guess is that I have had a viral problem. I've had plenty of HD failures in the past, and you can either boot up or not, or one usually sees the 'recovering from serious error message' chkdsk and the like...not this time!

Time will tell I suppose, I was just wondering if anyone else had seen anything like this recently.

Anyway a good rebuild always speeds things up and I've got rid of all the accumulated chaff ;)

[WAD62]

I am with Tony one this one. I would first try something like Smart UDM to view the smart file and if not run some generic diags such as Eurosoft's PC Check.

All run through successfully so far... :)

[aquapiranha]

Hi Will. I have just left my job as hardware breakfix engineer, I was doing this for over 10 years. Believe me when I tell you that HDD issues can manifest themselves in many ways. I hope you have everything sorted now anyway. :)

[WAD62]

Hi Will. I have just left my job as hardware breakfix engineer, I was doing this for over 10 years. Believe me when I tell you that HDD issues can manifest themselves in many ways. I hope you have everything sorted now anyway. :)

Cheers Steve,

We'll see how long for...might even be the motherboard, disk controllers, next time it goes I'm building a new one, this ones about 5 years old now :eyebrows:

[WAD62]

Steve, Tony, & Nick...

Dropped like a stone again :steam:

You were all correct, a hardware issue, after an awful lot of fecking around it turned out to be a rubbish SATA cable on my system disk.

A cheap fix...apart from the waste of time :doh:

Still 'The boards of Canada' are sounding very nice at the moment..some consolation at least :)