Subject: It's Alive!! It's Alive! (1/2)

Hello Wayne -

 WC> Winblows just nuked my hard drive to the point I got the
 WC> prompt "no operating system found."

[...]

 WC> All I did was a clean shutdown and turned the box on again
 WC> after installing the last much talked about critical update
 WC> that was supposed to halt unauthorized intrusion through
 WC> a gapping security hole.

 CA> I tried to install just the first update to W2K and it totally
 CA> trashed my system.  I've not tied again and don't intend to.
 CA> I seriously doubt the _need_ for most of the so-called 'updates'.

 WC> I think ZoneAlarm you turned me onto may take care of most
 WC> of those security holes but I'm not certain..

I use AVG to scan for virus, ZoneAlarm to block unwanted access
and went to www.grc.com to use Steve Gibson's downloadable utilities
to block the ports used by vandals.

 WC> EBD gave no help at all and even LiLo got clobbered :-(
 WC> CMOS wouldn't detect the hard drive either.

 CA> Sounds like either a power supply problem or over heating to me.

 WC> It's been fine for days now.
 WC> Power saver is set to low power the system at 20 minutes,
 WC> same for monitor but leaves the hard drive spinning at all
 WC> times.

Power saver functions are for battery powered systems.  No reason
to use them on a desktop other than to power down the monitor and
that can be done by windows AFAIK.

 WC> But just before I gave up I entered the proper figures into
 WC> CMOS and booted with my LINUX rescue disk and lo and behold
 WC> Knoppix came right up with no problem whatsoever!

 CA> KNOPPIX is read/only. Hard to trash that. :-)

 WC>  Not on the drive entering as root it's not.
 WC>  Remember I mounted /hda1 to take a look at it
 WC>  and I also reran LiLo, neither are currently allowed as an
 WC> ordinary user.
 WC>  Or do you mean if the image file isn't loaded
 WC>  it's invulnerable? That would make sense.
 WC>  Really annoying that /hda1 looked fine checking it out
 WC>  from Linux but when I used the EBD everything went to hell
 WC>  in a heartbeat.

You can only trash the file system that is in-use when the glitch
happens.  I'm assuming that you weren't using Linux at that time.

 WC> Mounted /dev/hda1 /mnt and had a look around and
 WC> the files and directories on the 98 FAT 32 partition
 WC> looked fine.

 WC> After doing a shutdown -r now from console the system
 WC> came up on the Windows emergency rescue diskette
 WC> saying I should do a "scanreg."
 WC> I did and it cycled through until there wasn't a single
 WC> valid registry backup :-(
 WC> So I ran scandisk it that pretty much vaporized anything
 WC> that looked much like Windows 98.
 WC> Yeah I had the undo disks but that too failed.
 WC> Several THOUSAND files were corrupted
 WC> and I didn't even have a Windows directory.

 CA> Still sounds like over heating to me.

 WC> Could be, you've been right an awfully lot but why
 WC> was Linux on /hda3 and /hda4 unaffected?
 WC> Also the system never actually seems to get very hot
 WC> anywhere when I've had the case open poking around.

A marginal voltage from the power supply?  Could be the
refrigerator kicking in and temporarily dropping the
wattage to a marginal power supply?

 WC> Took me days to get something near what I had before
 WC> doing a clean install from scratch :-(

 WC> No file attachments opened and both AVP and F-prot
 WC> were very recently updated, virus shield in place and
 WC> ZoneAlarm operating.
 WC> Took me a second or two to reinstall LiLo
 WC> so now I've again that option on boot instead of resorting
 WC> to the diskette.

 CA> Sorry to hear about your problems.  I totally trashed W2K no less
 CA> than 12 times before getting it stable here.  I know your pain.

 WC> Well, it's yet once again cleaned up my drive and I'm even
 WC> yet more organized than before.
 WC> What kills me is before the security patch Microsoft delayed
 WC> for 6 months so they'd get it right, that was their claim,
 WC> that's when the system crashed.
 WC> No other critical update had given a problem and I'd been
 WC> operating for months without problem.

There have been odd interactions with virus scanners, NAV being the
worst, and trouble with Roxio CD burning installs.  In my case here
it was IOMEGA zip drive software that was glitching the system until
I removed it (by hand editing the registry - argh!).

 RJT> In the meantime I *do* have a couple of "IBM" keyboards
here,  and hope
 RJT> they last...

 WC> Typing on one this very moment.
 WC> One of the old heavy suckers too but the O and L keys
 WC> are worn blank.
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