Danger Wil Robinson Danger!!!!

[Bacchus]

Ok

here is the story. A customer of mine called about his windows rebooting
over and over just as the windows splash screen with the Kit car gif
appears. I thought it was a corrupted registry.

I attempted a repair from his windows disc. It doesn't see his old copy of
windows XP. I didn't want to blow off his hard drive as naturally, he has
no backups of anything, dud. I did a boot with the option no reboot after
startup failure, Got a UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

Looked like a virus destoryed his boot sector. Pulled his hard drive and
put in a test system, ran two virus checkers, NO VIRUS. Ran a hard drive
check, hard drive is perfect no problems.

Saw all his files, hard drive looked normal enough and should have backed
everything up right there, but everything was running fine.

Rebooted and now my test system is doing the same EXACT THING. I though
well, I would format the drive and reinstall xp. As soon as the cd gets to
the options to install windows, the system SHUTS DOWN.

Ok, pulled another hard drive off the shelf and it does the same thing. It
would not boot windows even though it was orginally installed on this
machine and it has had no contact with the infected hard drive. Tried to
reinstall XP on it, SAME THING. The system shuts down as soon as the
option to install, repair or quit.

I have no idea now! Could there be something out there that is killing
hardware. I am now reintalling one of the hard drives on another machine
which has not been injected. It is taking the install but don't know what
to expect once it finished.

What is this crap? Anyone got any ideas?

Bacchus

 

[Bacchus]

Looked like a virus destoryed his boot sector. Pulled his hard drive and
put in a test system, ran two virus checkers, NO VIRUS. Ran a hard drive
check, hard drive is perfect no problems.

Just to note, if it seems confusing......
I had his hard drive set up as a slave on the test machine.

 

[Kerry Brown]

Coincidence?

 

[Bacchus]

Coincidence?

HUH

 

[Bacchus]

Coincidence?

Gets more interesting....

I cleared my CMOS on the test machine and now the orginal hard drive is
booting again, go figure?

 

[Bacchus]

Ok,

Also, cleared the CMOS on my cuatomers comuter.
His system is booting again...

Coincidence maybe....glich maybe.....

I am going to have to think about this one and add it to my
pool of experience

Happy 4th of july


Thanks

 

[Kerry Brown]

Gets more interesting....

I cleared my CMOS on the test machine and now the orginal hard drive
is booting again, go figure?

I was speculating that it was a coincidence. If it happens on two machines
that is a possibilty. If it happens on three machines then the chances of it
being a coincidence decreases. With this info it sounds like a possible
power problem with the drive in question drawing too much power, overloading
the power supply. It could also be some kind of malware in the boot sector
that scrambles the CMOS. This is the least likely possibility. You said the
drive in question was setup as a slave on the test machine so it's very
unlikely that any code in the boot sector was executed unless you set the
BIOS to boot from that drive.

 

[Steve]

I was speculating that it was a coincidence. If it happens on two machines
that is a possibilty. If it happens on three machines then the chances of it
being a coincidence decreases. With this info it sounds like a possible
power problem with the drive in question drawing too much power, overloading
the power supply. It could also be some kind of malware in the boot sector
that scrambles the CMOS. This is the least likely possibility. You said the
drive in question was setup as a slave on the test machine so it's very
unlikely that any code in the boot sector was executed unless you set the
BIOS to boot from that drive.

In my experience, the biggest fault of computers is the bit between the
keyboard and the chair. No offense to anyone, but even my own mother
does this: An accidental click on something that happened too fast for
the user to see what it was, therefor making it hard to set back, cos
you don't know what you changed. This can happen at boot time. Something
resting on the keyboard while you weren't looking, enough to depress the
delete key, the user panics, start pressing keys, and voila. A unusable
system. This may sound unbelievable, but it happens.

I rarely blame hardware straight off. I usually just start with settings
first, then go from there. Hardware is the last thing I check.

 

[NoStop]

In my experience, the biggest fault of computers is the bit between the
keyboard and the chair. No offense to anyone, but even my own mother
does this: An accidental click on something that happened too fast for
the user to see what it was, therefor making it hard to set back, cos
you don't know what you changed. This can happen at boot time. Something
resting on the keyboard while you weren't looking, enough to depress the
delete key, the user panics, start pressing keys, and voila. A unusable
system. This may sound unbelievable, but it happens.

I rarely blame hardware straight off. I usually just start with settings
first, then go from there. Hardware is the last thing I check.

Yes, coming from the Windoze world that is what you've learned. 9 times out
of 10, problems are o/s related rather than hardware related in the Windoze
world. In the Linux world on the other hand, if after some time of
stability, things start to get screwy, 9 times out of 10 the problem is
hardware related and that's the first place I'd look. That's the main
difference between a mature well developed operating system like Linux and
that hodge-podge thing MickeyMouse calls an o/s.


--
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