RocketMan on 4/6/2009 at 02:50
I've seen increasingly malicious viruses as time went on but this one takes the cake. Within a couple of hours some sort of rootkit virus made it's way onto my machine...how I dunno. It spread like wildfire making virus files everywhere. I had 3 scanners working in parellel to keep the shit at bay. As I began quarantining and deleting them my OS integrity dropped dramatically and I started getting critical errors and system files that were just damaged beyond repair....finally I cleaned the virus out entirely but by that time XP was completely destroyed beyond repair. I could not boot in ANY mode whatsoever, no splash screen, nothing...automatic reboot every time.
Thankfully i had Vista as well and this virus was such a bitch that it even damaged vista to an extent....no internet connectivity at all, no ability to install mobo drivers even....my software won't even recognise the Vista OS...all I have left in terms of functionality is the ability to copy and back up my personal files. I've been doing that but I ran into a problem.
Now I always make partitions so I don't have to put personal stuff on the c drive but some things are unavoidable....particularly the stuff in Documents and Settings, my desktop, my internet favourites, etc. Vista....being Vista...won't allow me access to my own files because they are within a foreign OS partition. I can see my desktop for example but cannot copy the files to another location to back them up. What a kick in the face...can't even get my own files off my own damn machine...and because i can't get into XP, I can't log in to prove to the computer that I am the admin of those folders.
My question is: Is there any way for me to get my files out of the c drive without resorting to rediculous hackery or convoluted hard drive swapping, etc. I just want to get my desktop folder and a couple others in My Documents and my Favourites...any ideas??? As it is right now I am sending this message from another computer because mine has been compromised so badly i can't get on the net. Thanks for the feedback.
Jadon on 4/6/2009 at 03:48
as an administrator, you should be able to forcibly take over the permissions of the folders you are wanting to access. but i dunno how right off in vista. :erg:
belboz on 4/6/2009 at 05:40
might have been a variant of the Parite virus, this nasty virus rewrites every file on your system to be a copy of itself, its an activex virus, i found that its loaded into your computer via google activex adverts designed by a 3rd party company that google sometimes uses. It writes an installer in windows/downloaded program files folder it then hides the installer as a hidden system file, then alter the registry so the program is run on a reboot 5 minutes after the reboot, so you think you've got rid of it, then it waits a bit and reinstalls itself.
RocketMan on 4/6/2009 at 13:16
Could be....it certainly had a mind of its own. At this point however I just want to blow everything away and start fresh...it's time for a format anyway. I'm only concerned about getting my files off before I do though. This virus can burn with the rest of my OS when I erase it.
steo on 4/6/2009 at 14:01
Can't you boot DOS from a CD/floppy/flash disk and copy the files over that way and then do a format?
RocketMan on 4/6/2009 at 16:07
Does that work? Last time I tried I got the same security bullshit blocking me.
Al_B on 4/6/2009 at 18:50
Something worth trying is to boot from a live Linux CD and copy the data from your hard drive onto removal storage. I have used (
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) Knoppix for this in the past when I had a problem with windows crashing as soon as it tried to mount the NTFS partition.
RocketMan on 4/6/2009 at 21:50
Aha so you can use a linux cd to gain access to the files?? Right now if I try to boot xp, i get past the OS selection menu, some shit happens with my cd drives and hdd light and then boom...reboot. If linux doesn't care about security privelages etc for xp then that might be an option....how can I do this?
RocketMan on 6/6/2009 at 03:13
Thanks for the link Al_B. Looks like a sort of last resort if you don't want to get into dismantling your hard drive and pulling bits off of the platter manually.
Actually I stayed up for hours fighting with my computer and eventually managed to heal xp to the point where it would boot for a few minutes before utterly crapping out, at which point I quickly copied all my personal stuff to another drive accessible from vista. I'll share my fix in case somebody else might benefit from it.
XP wouldn't boot at all. I suspected that either some critical startup files had been damaged beyond repair, or the master boot record was screwed up or the computer wasn't detecting the installation anymore. The recovery console that comes on the install disk told me that it could not even find an operating system at all. Couldn't do a check disk or anything. It didn't even recognise anything on the c drive at all so I couldn't copy over ntldr or ntdetect.com from the install disk. I abandoned that route for a while but then later, while in vista, decided to try to copy these files manually. I did so and wouldn't you know, it worked! Those 2 files alone allowed xp to get past the OS selection screen and actually load. Of course once logged in I was bombarded with literally unending errors pertaining to services failing, my virus program reported that every single process in active memory was infected and I was pretty much racing the clock to get my files off the c drive before I got a BSOD. In the end though, it was enough.
I just hope nobody has to deal with such pain. I'll tell you though, having a dual boot has saved my ass more than once. I'll never have just one on my computer again. You never know when your only OS will die, leaving you stranded with perfectly good files on your hdd that you can't retrieve.
