On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 20:22:31 -0800, "Jon Davis"
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>Every other time I reboot my computer, WinXP's ChkDsk thingamajitter comes
>up and scans my hard drive, and the other half of the time it boots up with
>a bunch of files all corrupted. After getting past the boot sequence,
>though, the computer runs fine. It's only at reboot that it starts finding
>all these files corrupted. I can be going for days and not reboot and have
>very few problems, but then when I reboot it starts choking on corrupt
>files, and I reboot again and ChkDsk comes up and scans the hard drive and
>pretty soon I find this message box telling me that I'm running on a backup
>copy of my registry.
>
>What are some possible causes of such behavior? The computer is only about a
>year old.
>
>I'm also getting mouse freezes for about five seconds every five minutes or
>so. Not sure if it's related (doubtful).
>
>I built this PC. This is like my tenth PC built for myself over the years,
>but I'm thinking about going with Dell from now on. Meantime, I need to
>figure out what's going on here.
>
>Software:
> Windows XP Pro
> .NET Framework 1.1
> Visual Studio 2003
> MS Office 2003
> etc.
>
>Hardware:
>
> Western Digital 80GB 120MB-cache hard drive
> Asus A7N8X motherboard
> nVidia GeForce 4200 Ti
> etc.
Are you running a BlackIce firewall? The "Witty" worm infects computers
running BlackIce and randomly writes to the hard disk. If that is the
case, there is no fix other than to reformat and reinstall Windows XP.
There is an interesting analysis of the worm here:
http://www.caida.org/analysis/security/witty/
They say that:
.. Witty was the first widely propagated Internet worm to carry a
destructive payload.
.. Witty was started in an organized manner with an order of magnitude
more ground-zero hosts than any previous worm.
.. Witty represents the shortest known interval between vulnerability
disclosure and worm release -- it began to spread the day after the ISS
vulnerability was publicized.
.. Witty spread through a host population in which every compromised host
was doing something proactive to secure their computers and networks.
.. Witty spread through a population almost an order of magnitude smaller
than that of previous worms, demonstrating the viability of worms as an
automated mechanism to rapidly compromise machines on the Internet, even
in niches without a software monopoly.
Jeff Bean