luvhuffer
Posts: 431 +2
It was a pretty normal day yesterday, except for the rain that eased the drought a bit here in Los Angeles. My son had called the day before, with his usual request..."Dad I got a virus downloading something on Ares. Can you come tomorrow to fix it?"
Being the dutiful father, I packed up my disks with my diagnostic programs on them, as well as a copy of XP Pro, and my hard drive from my computer.. 4 buses, two trains, and about 3 hours or so later, I arrived. Pretty dry considering the condition of my $4.95 poncho from Disneyland with Mickey Mouse on the back. I booted up his computer, and after getting to the desk top, it crashed. I booted up with Barts PE, went to the run programs and tried to start AVG. No go. I tried to boot Spybot S&D. That didn't work either. So I stuck in my hard drive, set it to master, and popped in the Pro disk. I was going to install the Pro on my HD since I was planning on wiping it anyway. I booted up, then my sons brother walked in to ask me something. My attention was distracted, but when I turned around, The XP Pro disk had booted my XP Home program from my system with a different mobo. There it was.
WTF? How many times have we told people, you can't boot a HD with an OS from a different system? There it was though. My 965 chipset booted to an 875 mobo. Well this is cool. So I started doing scans on my kids hard drive. I found about 75 files this Trojan had installed. Had to delete them one at a time from the registry. It ended up there was 7 different trojans/virii on his drives. So after a couple hours his system was up and running with all the data intact. I packed up my bag, stole about a dozen oranges from the neighbors tree, and headed back home.
My system on the other hand was bumming me out. My 7800GT I bought off of eBay was having serious problems. Artifacts, stuttering, not even working on any drivers from the 77.77's to the 93.81's. I couldn't even run far cry on the lowest settings, let alone something newer like Splinter Cell Double Agent. I was hoping the OS was corrupted, cause there were some other small issues like not staying signed in to sites and stuff. So I managed to get all the data off my boot drive onto my 300gig slave. I went to do a zero fill with the Max Blast CD on my Maxtor DM10 master, but it wouldn't work. Kept saying it wasn't a Maxtor drive. So I hooked it up as a slave to my Compaq Plll and it worked fine. Now I'm wondering if my mobo is having issues too. Jeez I just don't need this trauma, ya know? So I hook it back up to my system, and it's still being weird. I try some different cables. No go. Now my case has a hard drive cage that's removable, so the 2 drives are in the cage, not touching anything. I decide to reset the BIOS to fail safe cause I'm thinking the OC on the mobo may be corrupting the install. I turn the PSU back on, hit the power button and...
JESUS CHRIST! THE DAMN THING BLEW UP! I don't mean died. I mean first there is this huge blue spark, then flames shooting out from between the hard drives, then the room filled with blue sick smelling smoke. Meanwhile I'm getting up off my rear from where I landed when I jumped back after seeing the spark, ran over and pulled the plug out of the back. I took an extra Vicadin and went to bed. I just didn't want to deal with finding out if my whole system fried or what.
This morning I checked things out, and nothing was burnt except the controller board on the hard drive. I booted up from my 8gig back up drive, and everything was intact on the slave. So I moved everything to the 2nd and 3rd partitions, and reinstalled my OS on the 1st. Now my card is running perfectly. 130FPS on AM3 and almost 5000 on 3DMark '06. So thankfully the gods decided to only mess with me on one day. Now I seem safe from their mischievousness, and can relax.
A humorous aside to all this from the following few days...file under "Messing With Redmond"
I've had to reinstall the OS twice now in the last two days, so they seem to not be quite done with me yet. However, yesterday when I was activating over the phone I had a nice young girl from New Delhi or Bombay or something. We got to the point where the script reads, and she says "While I'm generating that activation code for you, may I ask why you re-installed windows?" Now I've read the EULA enough to know there is no specific reasons spelled out, so I said "Well there was a drive by shooting here last night, and one of the bullets went through the wall, through my head, and right into my hard drive." I could tell by her suppressed giggles she was thoroughly amused.
Now last night I got a guy, and he of course, asked the same question. Fearing the girl might have passed it on in the break room, and not wanting to be predictable I said, "Well you see, I'm an abductee. And they took me again last night. They told me if I didn't reinstall windows without any anti-virus protection so they could put me on their bot-net, then they would take me again and use the alien anal probe thing on me. So you see, I HAD to do it!" He wasn't amused, but said nothing.
All this reinstalling. I'm getting pretty disgusted with this J Micron SATA controller. How stupid is it that I have to install the drivers for a SATA controller so I can use the on-board IDE connector?
Oh ya I almost forgot. My kids half brother called this morning. He's got a virus from LimeWire...sigh
Being the dutiful father, I packed up my disks with my diagnostic programs on them, as well as a copy of XP Pro, and my hard drive from my computer.. 4 buses, two trains, and about 3 hours or so later, I arrived. Pretty dry considering the condition of my $4.95 poncho from Disneyland with Mickey Mouse on the back. I booted up his computer, and after getting to the desk top, it crashed. I booted up with Barts PE, went to the run programs and tried to start AVG. No go. I tried to boot Spybot S&D. That didn't work either. So I stuck in my hard drive, set it to master, and popped in the Pro disk. I was going to install the Pro on my HD since I was planning on wiping it anyway. I booted up, then my sons brother walked in to ask me something. My attention was distracted, but when I turned around, The XP Pro disk had booted my XP Home program from my system with a different mobo. There it was.
WTF? How many times have we told people, you can't boot a HD with an OS from a different system? There it was though. My 965 chipset booted to an 875 mobo. Well this is cool. So I started doing scans on my kids hard drive. I found about 75 files this Trojan had installed. Had to delete them one at a time from the registry. It ended up there was 7 different trojans/virii on his drives. So after a couple hours his system was up and running with all the data intact. I packed up my bag, stole about a dozen oranges from the neighbors tree, and headed back home.
My system on the other hand was bumming me out. My 7800GT I bought off of eBay was having serious problems. Artifacts, stuttering, not even working on any drivers from the 77.77's to the 93.81's. I couldn't even run far cry on the lowest settings, let alone something newer like Splinter Cell Double Agent. I was hoping the OS was corrupted, cause there were some other small issues like not staying signed in to sites and stuff. So I managed to get all the data off my boot drive onto my 300gig slave. I went to do a zero fill with the Max Blast CD on my Maxtor DM10 master, but it wouldn't work. Kept saying it wasn't a Maxtor drive. So I hooked it up as a slave to my Compaq Plll and it worked fine. Now I'm wondering if my mobo is having issues too. Jeez I just don't need this trauma, ya know? So I hook it back up to my system, and it's still being weird. I try some different cables. No go. Now my case has a hard drive cage that's removable, so the 2 drives are in the cage, not touching anything. I decide to reset the BIOS to fail safe cause I'm thinking the OC on the mobo may be corrupting the install. I turn the PSU back on, hit the power button and...
JESUS CHRIST! THE DAMN THING BLEW UP! I don't mean died. I mean first there is this huge blue spark, then flames shooting out from between the hard drives, then the room filled with blue sick smelling smoke. Meanwhile I'm getting up off my rear from where I landed when I jumped back after seeing the spark, ran over and pulled the plug out of the back. I took an extra Vicadin and went to bed. I just didn't want to deal with finding out if my whole system fried or what.
This morning I checked things out, and nothing was burnt except the controller board on the hard drive. I booted up from my 8gig back up drive, and everything was intact on the slave. So I moved everything to the 2nd and 3rd partitions, and reinstalled my OS on the 1st. Now my card is running perfectly. 130FPS on AM3 and almost 5000 on 3DMark '06. So thankfully the gods decided to only mess with me on one day. Now I seem safe from their mischievousness, and can relax.
A humorous aside to all this from the following few days...file under "Messing With Redmond"
I've had to reinstall the OS twice now in the last two days, so they seem to not be quite done with me yet. However, yesterday when I was activating over the phone I had a nice young girl from New Delhi or Bombay or something. We got to the point where the script reads, and she says "While I'm generating that activation code for you, may I ask why you re-installed windows?" Now I've read the EULA enough to know there is no specific reasons spelled out, so I said "Well there was a drive by shooting here last night, and one of the bullets went through the wall, through my head, and right into my hard drive." I could tell by her suppressed giggles she was thoroughly amused.
Now last night I got a guy, and he of course, asked the same question. Fearing the girl might have passed it on in the break room, and not wanting to be predictable I said, "Well you see, I'm an abductee. And they took me again last night. They told me if I didn't reinstall windows without any anti-virus protection so they could put me on their bot-net, then they would take me again and use the alien anal probe thing on me. So you see, I HAD to do it!" He wasn't amused, but said nothing.
All this reinstalling. I'm getting pretty disgusted with this J Micron SATA controller. How stupid is it that I have to install the drivers for a SATA controller so I can use the on-board IDE connector?
Oh ya I almost forgot. My kids half brother called this morning. He's got a virus from LimeWire...sigh
