The Glade 4.0

I hope you die; I hate you.

You continue to pester me about installing SP1, and put it into the important updates area so I cannot hide it. But this piece of software; and I use this term as generously as humanly possible, is a broken and crippling pile of flaming monkey ****.

After I installed this refuse onto my laptop it crashed my computer in a way that required me to pull my battery for no less than 5 minutes and then try and power the system on with the battery out and only the AC adapter in use. The system would not boot to safe mode or normal mode. The system would get past post, and then it would shut down, requiring the above referenced method of getting it back online.

In anticipation of such an event being possible I created a system restore point prior to this installation. But when I attempted to use this system restore point from the manufacturers recovery options, I found no joy. Once again begging the question: why in the fluffy hell do you bother to put this system restore on the systems if it does not **** work?

This was the beginning of a lost night of trying to repair this otherwise great computer system. My next option was to attempt to load the factory default settings from the manufacturers recovery partition. Well, the pile of Bonobo fæces that you call SP1 64-bit left my recovery partition choking like the late Haley Paige on date night after being slipped a handful of roofies. This left me the dubious honor of sitting here now, on my iPod typing this because my gorram computer is being formatted and reloaded from scratch.

I know my computer hardware is not at fault since I had reinstalled the factory default image not even 48 hours prior to the attempted installation of SP1 (which I will now term Sepuku Pack). The ONLY difference in the previous installation and the new installation was that I decided to get rid of all the crap that I had installed prior to installing SP1.

Luckily I have made a habit of putting all of my school data onto both an external hard drive, emailing it to myself via gmail and utilizing an 8Gb USB Flash drive. So my foresight did not cause me to lose the past 5 years worth of study and work I have done.

I am also happy for this opportunity to give alternatives to the Microsoft Operating Systems a try at this time. I can only hope that the future finds you, or your kin being kicked into the back of a starship jet engine ala Firefly.

Thank you,
a consumer

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

and in an awesome follow up... Format/reload does not appear to be working either... for some reason it is having difficulty loading the files to the HDD.

Again, this was not a problem when I did the **** reload 48 hours ago... everything worked awesome until the SP1 load.

So I am going to be only able to check stuff from work.

Again, **** you microsoft.


hrm, strangely: Ubuntu is finding no drive with a live file system...

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I think your problem sounds like hardware, not software.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

oh, update... it will boot into windows if i choose to modify the boot order and then choose the hdd manually

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

i hope it is not hardware. if it is i am pretty much shut down computerwise on an indefinite basis.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

so... I swapped the Hdd of two computers. my bad comp and a dying MB comp. Both hdd's worked fine. put my computers HDD back in and nothing. this is frustrating. both drives recignize in one system, only one in the other.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Sounds like a user error to me! (Sorry I used to do Tech Support and couldn't resist). Good luck with the problem though, I think Microsoft poisons PCs with their updates. I turned them off 2 years ago and magically this system hasn't had any performance rot.

_________________

User errors are the consequence of poor software. People who use Windows aren't supposed to be experts in installing operating systems.

try running burning MHDD and running it on the drive. I've been able to salvage two drives that were otherwise unsalvagable using that tool.

I've updated my Windows installs every Tuesday since 7 came out and haven't had any problems. This also includes my Windows VMs running in OSX.

I still really do not get how this happened. The odd part... if I change the boot menu on the fly and choose to reboot the the HDD, it will come up.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Makes me wonder if you've got a boot sector root kit. I've seen this recently with Alureon on Win 7.

MBRCheck might help.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

okay... here is what has transpired since all of this started:

I was finally able to to get it to boot... by going into the BIOS and disabling the USB and the DVD drive. This let it get to the factory restore. Once this restore was done I re-enabled the DVD and then rebooted, it worked... I then re-enabled the USB and rebooted. It also came up and worked.

I thought of the MBR thing but a full format/reload would have taken care of that (I thought). And my curiosity is peaked on how I got it since after the OS reload I had still not done anything with the system but run windows updates.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

It's been years, but unless something has changed, I'm pretty sure you have to re-write the Master Boot Record to remove anything infecting it (I don't think just reformatting during the install will do the trick).

I've haven't had to such a thing, probably since the early days of XP, but a quick google search reveals some how-to's...

http://www.google.com/search?q=windows+ ... ord+repair

Ninja Edit:
Kaspersky has a bootable repair disk that is apparently pretty good at cleaning these types of things. Might be handy to have around..
http://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/rescuedisk

I am checking out that kapersky file and the MBRCheck.

Also, any time I say format/reload... I always include ripping out any partitions and repartitioning, I constantly forget to say that... but if I cannot repartition I am not happy.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I have also got my paid license of MalwareBytes, SuperAntispyware, MGTools and Spybot S&D all on a disk ready to install.

Before I install every one of these programs... any advice against mixing? Will it be like drinking Bourbon while snorting blow and smoking weed kind of cosmic breakdown?

And for my Antivirus, I am going back to Avast from Microsoft Security Essentials. I like having an email scanner.

And is it safe to merge Adaware SE Pro into the mix?

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

MBRCheck found a nonstandard (unknown) MBR. I had it repair it with the default MBR for Windows 7.

Thank you, I am keeping this program handy...

i think I need to scan all of my porn for issues.

Edit: So... the MBR still shows as unknown even after running the program 3 times, and after scanning all my stuff, no spyware and Malwarebytes found 1 infected file, and it was in something I forgot I had... so it has been deleted.

Edited Edit: hrm... I plug in my external USB hard drive and the computer will not boot. But if I wait for the system to be booted and THEN plug in, it works fine... or I turn off the USB boot option and it works fine... I may need to see if I can format this drive (oh lord this will SUUUUCK)

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

The partition table is part of the MBR, but the MBR also contains the master boot loader code. Reformatting only overwrites filesystem structures within a partition, and repartitioning only overwrites data in the partition table portion of the MBR. Although you might expect the Windows installer to also overwrite the boot loader code, it probably doesn't, for compatibility reasons. On multi-OS systems, for instance, it's entirely possible that your MBR contains stage 1 of the GRUB/GRUB2 boot loader, and that you don't want Windows to overwrite it with the (less capable) Microsoft boot loader.

In fact, I should have thought about that before I linked MBRCheck. I hope your laptop wasn't dual-booting Linux or something. If so, you may have just blown away a perfectly good GRUB. I'm not sure if MBRCheck is aware of GRUB, LILO, etc. :/

Otherwise, it sounds like you did have boot-sector root kit. The most likely culprit is something in the TDSS/Alureon family. It is usually not possible to remove these with conventional AV programs due to the fact that the (malicious) boot loader is executed before the processor even switches to protected mode, let alone before the kernel is loaded. Basically, your entire OS and everything running within it is "inside the matrix" from the moment it's "born".

Kaspersky does make a free tool that specifically targets the TDSS/Alureon rootkit family. With a working knowledge of exactly how these rootkits work, it is theoretically possible to remove them from within the infected system.

TDSSKiller (download on this page)

I've had mixed results with it in the past, but hopefully if you can get the MBR portion cleaned up first, it will be able to finish the job. The MBR code is only part of the rootkit. This rootkit family likes to infect low-level disk-access drivers like ATAPI.SYS, and if you don't clean that portion as well, 1) You'll still be root-kitted and 2) they can re-infect the MBR.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

not booting with a non-bootable USB drive connected is normal, depending on your boot order.

I've pulled my hair out over this one, not realizing I had a flash drive plugged in somewhere.

And I agree with Stathol, it does sound like you did indeed have a rootkit, or something malicous affecting your MBR.

Some quick google searches reveal a lot of folks with similar symptoms to yours who had rootkits.

Sounds like your angst might be slighly mis-directed. =)

I share the **** Microsoft sentiment, but I've generally been pleased with Winblows 7.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

TDS Killer found nothing. But as long as I get running when I reboot: it will be fine until one of the programs detects a problem.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

The only MS thing I really hated that I had was Windows ME, but that came with an Alienware system I bought for-ever ago.

I really like W7 though.

_________________
"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I honestly have had good experience with MS. I really have, it just seemed too coincidental that this happened when I downloaded SP1...

that is all.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I too like Win 7. Although there are some usability challenges (for me anyway) with Windows Explorer, the Network setup stuff.

Trying to find the right place to view or change a setting of some kind was pretty frustrating until I learned that I could just type what I was looking for in the Start/Search dialog and get just about anywhere much faster.

Also, pinning things to the task bar and start menu helps a lot for frequently used applets.

I also learned a pretty cool trick. You can get an elevated 'command prompt here' dialog by CTRL-SHIFT-Right Clicking a folder.

It may not have been coincidental. Considering that the scope of a service pack is just about the entire Windows environment, it wouldn't be too surprising if it triggered an incompatibility with the rootkit. Or, just as likely, the rootkit could easily have fouled up the service pack installation process, such as if it tried to replace one of the "hooked" kernel modules (ex. frequently ATAPI.SYS). Either way, it could easily put your system into an unbootable or unstable state where previously the OS and the rootkit had been "getting along".

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.