Posted: 4/6/2009 6:41:38 PM EDT
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The wife's' PC got a Trojan horse and she can no longer open Windows at all, I know this is a vague description of the problem, but that was all I could get from her as she has been struggling with this for a while and isn't a very happy person right now. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for looking! AB |
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you're going to hear a lot of stuff about safe mode, windows repair, ect...
it seems like all i do anymore is fight viruses and spyware. save yourself a few steps and just pull the drive out and put it into another machine. run adaware, avg free, and malwarebytes on the drive and remove anything they find. then replace the c:\windows\system32\ userinit.exe with a known good version. run scandisk and defrag. back up all your data to the computer the computer that you put the drive into. - don't forget the email files. put the drive back into the computer and try to boot. if these steps don't do the trick than it's probably beyond what you will want to do yourself. if it does boot, run adaware, avg free, and malwarebytes again to clean the registry. or if you don't want to take it somewhere, put the cd in and do a full reinstall with format. |
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Boot with Linux live CD.
Save files to a USB thumb drive. Wipe HD. Reinstall OS of your choice. Yeah, sure, we can all go into 5 good programs for spyware/virus removal/restoration/etc. However, I am smart enough to know that there are MANY folks out there that are writing viruses that are smarter than the reactionary antivirus program writers. You could try to remove the virus, but how do you know you got rid of it completely, or that there is not additional damage to the file system? Blow the machine away, and be done with it. |
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Quoted:
Boot with Linux live CD. Save files to a USB thumb drive. Wipe HD. Reinstall OS of your choice. Yeah, sure, we can all go into 5 good programs for spyware/virus removal/restoration/etc. However, I am smart enough to know that there are MANY folks out there that are writing viruses that are smarter than the reactionary antivirus program writers. You could try to remove the virus, but how do you know you got rid of it completely, or that there is not additional damage to the file system? Blow the machine away, and be done with it. What exactly do you mean by this, actually shooting the CPU? It's less than a year old. 
AB |
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Quoted:
you're going to hear a lot of stuff about safe mode, windows repair, ect... it seems like all i do anymore is fight viruses and spyware. save yourself a few steps and just pull the drive out and put it into another machine. run adaware, avg free, and malwarebytes on the drive and remove anything they find. then replace the c:\windows\system32\ userinit.exe with a known good version. run scandisk and defrag. back up all your data to the computer the computer that you put the drive into. - don't forget the email files. put the drive back into the computer and try to boot. if these steps don't do the trick than it's probably beyond what you will want to do yourself. if it does boot, run adaware, avg free, and malwarebytes again to clean the registry. or if you don't want to take it somewhere, put the cd in and do a full reinstall with format. I read your suggestion for rectifing the problem to the wife, and she said,"why move the HD from one machine to another, I'll still have the same problem"?
AB |
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Quoted: Quoted: you're going to hear a lot of stuff about safe mode, windows repair, ect... it seems like all i do anymore is fight viruses and spyware. save yourself a few steps and just pull the drive out and put it into another machine. run adaware, avg free, and malwarebytes on the drive and remove anything they find. then replace the c:\windows\system32\ userinit.exe with a known good version. run scandisk and defrag. back up all your data to the computer the computer that you put the drive into. - don't forget the email files. put the drive back into the computer and try to boot. if these steps don't do the trick than it's probably beyond what you will want to do yourself. if it does boot, run adaware, avg free, and malwarebytes again to clean the registry. or if you don't want to take it somewhere, put the cd in and do a full reinstall with format. I read your suggestion for rectifing the problem to the wife, and she said,"why move the HD from one machine to another, I'll still have the same problem"? AB What he means is, put the HDD in another computer as a secondary hard drive. Boot that computer up, and use that PC's OS install to run scans on the other hard drive. |
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What he means is, put the HDD in another computer as a secondary hard drive. Boot that computer up, and use that PC's OS install to run scans on the other hard drive. Sounds like a good way to cross contaminate. i've used that method for years to virusscan/ malware scan computers. |
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Quoted:
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you're going to hear a lot of stuff about safe mode, windows repair, ect... it seems like all i do anymore is fight viruses and spyware. save yourself a few steps and just pull the drive out and put it into another machine. run adaware, avg free, and malwarebytes on the drive and remove anything they find. then replace the c:\windows\system32\ userinit.exe with a known good version. run scandisk and defrag. back up all your data to the computer the computer that you put the drive into. - don't forget the email files. put the drive back into the computer and try to boot. if these steps don't do the trick than it's probably beyond what you will want to do yourself. if it does boot, run adaware, avg free, and malwarebytes again to clean the registry. or if you don't want to take it somewhere, put the cd in and do a full reinstall with format. I read your suggestion for rectifing the problem to the wife, and she said,"why move the HD from one machine to another, I'll still have the same problem"?
AB What he means is, put the HDD in another computer as a secondary hard drive. Boot that computer up, and use that PC's OS install to run scans on the other hard drive. Oh believe me, I knew what he meant. My wife is a stubborn, hardheaded Irish redhead, her balls are ten times bigger than mine. I have serious problems, she won't listen to shit. In fact I really don't know why I'm attempting to get info for her, since she knows everyfuckingthing anyway.   
AB |