Does this sound like a virus.........

[pammy]

A friend has just been on the phone to say their PC seems to have gone a bit doolally

Basically the PC froze and would do nothing. He switched it off at the wall then switched it back on again. Rather than loading up as normal he was given three options, F1 - Recovery, F8 - Safe and F10 - can't remember what that was. He tried F8 but it wouldn't work, neither would F10. It only allowed him to do F1.

Now the PC is acting as though it's fresh out of the box asking them to set up an internet account but all their previous icons (iTunes etc) are visible on the desktop but they can't get at any of it. They seem to be stuck in some sort of eternal loop.

He has been a twit and has not been running updated AV, Fortunately his wife has had the sense to back up the photos of their baby to CD except for the past two weeks.

We need to know if there is anyway of recovering this and of knowing what it is we're dealing with. They are not the most PC literate and indeed his reaction was we need to buy a new PC - excuse to spend more money

Anybody got any ideas of how best to tackle this?

Thanks

 

[fuzzer]

He switched it off at the wall then switched it back on again.

wrong answer ... she would have been different .. but he ....

 

[pammy]

wrong answer ... she would have been different .. but he ....

cheeky!! and it was "he"

 

[imadoofus]

The thing that worked for me when a friend had a similar problem was to install the faulty hard drive into another (protected) machine, as a slave. Run the virus scanner on the good machine, and hope to recover that way.

In my example, there was no virus, but it enabled us to get off all his data, so that he could install it on the new hard drive he ended up having to buy.

I would stress that he did this (I was out), so I don't really have any further details...

PJ

 

[Sp!ke]

Quite often new PC's come with a hidden partition to rebuild the OS in case of an emergency.

Sounds like he selected this option. All his data and configuration settings will now have been overwritten and are pretty much gone forever unless he is prepared to spend some money on professional data recovery.

Next time he might be more sensible to take advice *before* blindly proceeding.

As for the original freeze being caused by a virus? Possibly, but then the virus could easily have been cleaned had he not made the catastrophic decision to overwrite the hdd.

POBKACH - Problem Occured Between Keyboard And Chair!

 

[pammy]

Quite often new PC's come with a hidden partition to rebuild the OS in case of an emergency.

Sounds like he selected this option. All his data and configuration settings will now have been overwritten and are pretty much gone forever unless he is prepared to spend some money on professional data recovery.

But if this was the case then why are icons for recently installed software visible on the desktop? For example, iTunes seems to be there - or would you expect to see that vanish once they'd set up the internet account which is the loop they can't get out of at the mo.

When windows opens it immediately brings up the internet set up wizard which won't go away

And do you think some professional data recovery could get it back then? How much is "serious money"? They may well be willing to pay up tp get the photo's they've lost even though it's not that many.

 

[W210 Fan]

I think getdataback for NTFS (windows XP file system) is 91.64 euros.

http://www.runtime.org/prices.htm

 

[PJH]

Could try a power on with the anti-virus CD already in the drive.
ie the first thing the PC will do is boot from CD and run anti-virus before the system is fully up.

 

[fuzzer]

http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/

Get them to boot up in safe mode and try this ....

Download the stinger and run it.


Can they still browse the C drive , check this in safe mode ...

 

[Benzowner]

He has effectively crashed the hard drive, I had to do this a few times in the past, but got away with only having to carry out a disc scan. Try starting the puter up in safe mode and running a disc scan. It will check for any damaged bits, not physically damaged, and can take a few minutes, depending on the size of hard drive. Computers don't like being turned off at the wall, if it freezes again, hold the main computer on/off switch for a couple of seconds and it will close down. Hope he resolves his problem.