-=> CHARLES ANGELICH wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-

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

As do I per your recommendations.
Still during a google search I hit a site which breached security.
I was looking for source for a shareware game to test my
reflexes after a recent incident and up came a site
promoting Warez :-(
Repeated attempts to close the browser failed as it kept reopening :-(
I killed the dialer to eliminate that threat then deleted
Win temp files.

No idea how this clown's code breached my system.

 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.

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

 Well the heater only takes 14 watts.
 What the heck I conserve power.
 I do have the monitor powered down in Win 98 but the
 system sleep mode is invoked in CMOS.
 Don't ask me why but any other combinations cause lockups
 and problems.

 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.

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

Yeah but why was the C drive not recognized in any way except through
booting Linux and mounting it there where all looked well?
It is a puzzlement.

 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.

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

 The computer is by design on a completely separate leg
 of my wiring and has a surge protector.
 AC, refridgerator and microwave are on different circuits.
 Load on this leg is at at MOST 400 watts with no inductive components.
 
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