Posted: 3/19/2008 12:36:22 AM EDT
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OK, long story short, my laptop is sick. The techie answer is I contracted a case of MEBROOT. This thing is nasty, it installs in your MBR (master boot record) and is preventing me from booting in any mode, safe or otherwise. I tried booting from CD, but just before it gets to the recovery console (the part that could fix all this), it freezes up. The situation is now officially over my head. So does anyone know a REAL good tech guy/gal? Feel free to IM me any info, I have access at work, and thanks in advance. PS- You may want to check your BIOS if you run XP, if you have the option "Master Boot Record write-protection" feature, you may want to turn it on. I wish I could have. |
| Recovering your drive is unlikely. Either get a whiz-bang disk utility which you can boot from a CD that will format your entire drive (MBR and all), or buy a new hard drive and toss the old one. Either answer means reinstalling your OS. Screwing around with trying to clean hard core viruses or spyware isn't worth the time, unless there is something you REALLY want to get off that hard drive. |
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Don't give up yet.... www.updatexp.com/mebroot.html Give me a call. D |
So who is the PC doctor around here? I have a problem with my laptop. It's under warranty but I am afraid to send it back. I have thousands of pics from Iraq on it that I want to salvage if possible. When I turn it on the screen stays black and I get one long beep and two shorts.
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I told you I could take it to my buddy at work to fix..  but you haven't mentioned it lately..
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I told you I could take it to my buddy at work to fix.. but you haven't mentioned it lately..
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I use and highly recommend morcoth (James) here from the board. A few months back I had the same problem as Greyknight on my PC and morcoth was able to recover my data for me. He pulled the hard drive and transferred the data to my external backup drive (Seagate). I thought it was gone forever, but he managed to pull it off. The man is a genius when it comes to machines. He also bailed me out when I had issues with my laptop. It isn't a hobby for him it is what he does every day for a living. His rate is fair and he is not the type of guy that will stroke you. If it can be fixed, remedied, or recovered he will make it happen. If it can't be salvaged he will tell you straight up and not nickel and dime you to death. I'll give him a call and tell him a doctor is needed here on the NVHTF. He also makes house calls which is a cool thing too. Also, I would highly recommend getting an external hard drive and backing up your data if not every couple of days, at least weekly. I almost learned the hard way. Now everything gets backed up. Hope this helps. Joe |
In addition to an external hard drive, which tend to fail also, I would use an online backup service likeJungle Disk. It's using Amazon's S3 service and the prices are extremely reasonable. I'm backing up my Windows Home Server (1.6 TB of total space) every night with their plug in and storing 15 GB (mostly digital pics and other important documents plus some of the applications I've developed) for less than $5 a month. I would back up my MP3's, but I have those on about 5 external hard drives right now (my prior backup strategy). Plus, Cox limits you to some 15GB per month of bandwidth so it would take forever (about 20 months) to store them. |
Great advice on the online backup server. I have been meaning to look into that for some time now. Thanks. Joe |
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If you have access to another computer (yours, friends, work, etc) download, and burn an ISO of Knoppix Linux (live cd) Boot from that CD, and you will have a full OS, with networking, and NTFS support. You can then retrieve the data, store it on an external device (USB, Firewire, Flash) or copy it to a network share... Root kits are nasty, after recovering your data, I would fdisk it, and re-install your Windows OS |
We'll try that... |
| Thanks everyone. I actually debated the Linux idea and have already burned an exact copy of the hard disk through an external hard drive enclosure so I can pursue that option later. The anti-virus from Walmart sounds like another potential winner and I think I will be seeing Walmart tommorow. Again, thanks all, my whole life is on this drive, many of the programs' activation codes are actually stored on the drive (talk about stupidity on my part) and there are more irreplaceable photos than I care to admit. |
If you have the original Windows installation CD boot off of that. When it boots up, select recovery console. At the recovery console prompt type in FIXMBR and that should rebuild that portion of the hard drive. |
Hard drive should be fine. More than likely the problem is with one of the mainboard components. You should be able to remove the hard drive from that system and connect it to another PC as a second drive and copy the data off. |
Yeah, I tried using someone else boot disk(my computer didn't come with one), but it hangs up on "setup is now starting windows" and won't do anything else. Does anyone know how to clone a disk? By clone I mean make an exact copy, one that after I clean it, will literally just plug in and boot with all my old software working? Could I find the 1187 file on my disk (I think that is what the file is called, I heard that is basicly your copy of the boot disk installed on your drive) and build a boot specifically for my system? And finnally could I put the removed drive on another PC and run the FIXMBR command just on my hard drive? Thanks again all, and sorry for tying up so much board time. |