From: "Geo." 

2 drives and a mirror partition being mirrored in the wrong direction?
(lets call this the murrey effect, after Bill Murrey from groundhog day)

Geo.

"Chris Robinson"  wrote in
message news:3F8FA704.17AB77C{at}NOSPAMtotalise.co.uk...
> This is the strangest problem I've ever seen on a PC.  The PC belongs to
> my flatmate's brother and runs Windows 2000 service pack 2.  His brother
> called him up yesterday to say he was having a strange problem.  He said
> that whenever he reeboots his PC it goes back to how it was before (a
> GREAT description there :oP).
>
> Anyway, my friend went over to have a look at it and here's what
> happens:
>
> - You boot up the PC and it boots into Windows with no problems.  Let's
> call the state it's in after boot (all files/ folders/ settings etc)
> state A.
> - Whatever you now do to the system, like install/ uninstall software/
> apply Windows service packs/ delete files, when you reboot it will
> return to state A with any deleted files returing, any installed
> programs not there anymore etc.
>
> First off, let me tell you that the system has a 30Gb Hard Drive.  5Gb
> is for the Windows partition and the other 25Gb is a seperate partition
> for data.  Both are fairly full (the Windows drive only had about 38Mb
> free when my frend went around to look at it).  Here's what he did:
>
> - Booted the system.  Uninstalled AVG6 and installed AVG7, making sure
> all registry entries/files for AVG6 were gone comletely.  Ran a full
> VirusScan of the system and found some Virus's that he said were
> "non-major" ones.  AVG removed them completely.  He disabled system
> restore/ hibernation features.  He then cleared over 1.5Gb of temp
> files/ crap from the Windows drive and defragged the system (which took
> 1/2hr or so).  He then deleted about 1Gb of data files from the other
> partition as a test (these were backed up onto CD).
> - So, after doing this, he reboots the system.  Guess what?  It returns
> exactly to state A - the virus's are back, AVG6 is back with no trace of
> AVG7, the 2.5Gb of deleted files had returned and the drive was as
> fragmented as before.  Strange huh?  He also mentioned there was no
> major hard disk activity upon reboot (so some app wasn't restoring an
> image each time - and where would it store the data anyways?)...
>
> I mean, you start to think that it's some kind of problem with data
> being written to the disk (i.e. it's not being!) but can this happen on
> this scale?  Is it possible that there's some kind of program lurking
> that makes Windows think it's performing write operations to the disk
> but isn't?
>
> The strangest thing is that he's tried it all in safe mode with the same
> effect.  Also, the defragging bit's odd because he saw it defrag and
> there was hard disk activity when it was defragging (like there should
> be).  I've suggested trying a tool like Eraser to completely wipe some
> files whilst in Windows and see if they return but I think they would by
> the sounds of things because it appears that they're not actually being
> deleted in the first place!
>
> Has anyone ever seen this kind of thing before?  I know there are 3rd
> party devices that can do this (I think NEC make one that restores an
> image on each boot) - but this is a PC that my flatmate built from
> scratch.
>
> Chris....
>
>
>

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