Total pc failure

Saturday, November 17th, 2007

I don’t reboot often. My computer stays on most of the time, switching between hibernating and playing WoW. I actually rebooted it recently to try out a liveCD of Fedora 8 and a liveCD of Gutsy Gibbon. I had my fun with Linux and rebooted into Windows2KPro. (I don’t trust WinXP. Don’t even get me started on Vista.) Things were a little weird. Lots of disk activity, very slow response time. But nothing showed up in the task manager. It looked like the CPU was idle. Yet it took forever to launch programs or to cancel them. Then it locked up completely and I tried rebooting, which got me a blue screen of death telling me to remove the bogus hard drive I had just installed. Huh? It also said something about virus attacks and told me to check my boot sector.

That should be no problem, as soon as I can get the system booted. I’ve still got my install CD sitting close by for occasions like this. But when I popped it in, I got a “hit any key to boot from cd” and then it booted to the broken disk.

Oh, by the way, an attempted boot from this disk now goes like this: Bios loads, checks for USB boot device, checks for CD, prompts for boot to CD, no matter what you do at this point it just boots from hard disk, then the win2k text progress bar appears and takes much longer than usual, then the graphical win2k progress bar appears and before it gets to the end, the blue screen of death appears.

But it turns out that the nefarious force that is keeping me from booting to a CD isn’t a very tricky virus. It is the fact that my bios has USB keyboard support disabled. Huh, I never noticed that before. I’ve always been able to use my usb keyboard to edit bios settings in the past, but that crucial ability to press any key to boot from CD is something I’ve never needed before.

Now I’m in the Win2k recovery dance. I don’t have a floppy drive, so I don’t have a floppy recovery disk. That means that win2k recovery doesn’t have the clues it needs to find a win2k directory on my hard disk. That means I get to try to fix the boot sector from the command console. I’ve got options like chkdsk, fixboot, diskpart, fixmbr, etc. How do I tell it to show me the disks that are attached? It tells me I’m on the C: drive now, but I’m pretty sure that is pointing to the CD at the moment.

hmm, fixmbr seemed to do something. It told me my mbr was nonstandard and then said it successfully wrote out a new one. Let’s try another reboot to see what happens now.

OK, the new MBR got me a successful boot. Sweet. It took a long time, but it came up eventually in a familiar state. Something is still fishy though. This is taking way too long. I’m pulling the network plug on it, in case it is now a zombie. Hmm, what can I scan it with next? I’ve got AVG and AdAware. Also BOClean and Komodo. Those were all active when this problem cropped up. Maybe I’ll try a basic disk scan first. Defrag, wave a rubber chicken, and make sure that the hardware is reliable. Oh, I also did a memory test in my many reboots earlier, so that’s one test done.

Doing anything productive on this machine could be hard because it is spewing Windows System Error dialog boxes that say “Unknown hard error”. They seem to be appearing about one a second. Yeah, this won’t work, I can’t even get a command console to open up. I’ll have to reboot into safe mode. On second thought, maybe I’ll try the win2k repair tool again. It just might be able to see my hard disk now.

Huzzah! The repair tool found my old win2k installation and is offering to repair it. Sounds like a good deal to me. I’ll say OK! Ahh, that’s a big, beautiful, empty progress bar. It promises a perfectly harmonious system at the end. Oh, look, a little yellow progress. Lots of whirring. I can just hear the bits sliding into formation.

Now is the time I should be planning my attack on that potential virus. I don’t want to let it reactivate on next boot, but I don’t think I can scan it properly from some other boot media. The win2k install disk should let me scan for virii. But I suppose that is a lot to ask. I’ll just have to try to rip it out in stages. Hopefully I can catch enough of it to disable it and then get the rest on the next reboot.

OK, why did I ever think I needed an 80GB disk? This is taking forever. Time to wash the dishes and check back later.

It finished and I booted back into win2k. It still took way to long and after about five minutes of sitting unattended, it just spontaneously rebooted. So now I’m running the repair tool again to see if I see the same corruption as last time. If my ntldr is bad now, it isn’t just because I’ve installed security updates some time in the past year. Ooo, from now on, I don’t have to worry about security updates anymore… isn’t win2k completely unsupported? Phew.

Hmm, the repair tool didn’t find anything wrong this time. But windows is still unusable. I guess it is time to graduate to Safe Mode and see what can be done from there. If this fails, I might have to reinstall on top of the existing win2k and lose all my registry settings. Then I’ll have to reinstall everything… sigh.

That’s odd. Safe mode comes up with a mostly blank screen. It says safe mode at the top, but there is nothing to click on, no icons, and no right-click menu comes up. I think this mode is a little too safe. I’ll try a different safe mode like, safe mode with command prompt next.

The safe mode command line came up, but only after a very long time. Maybe I didn’t wait long enough for the other safe mode. I’m running chkdsk now and it seems to be doing fine. I’ll try getting to a virus scanner next. I couldn’t do any graphical applications from the command line. So I rebooted into the tempting “Last known good configuration”. That comes up into a normal looking desktop, but incredibly slow. It may be locked up at this point creeping toward its next spontaneous reboot. The cursor alternates between moving but no clicking on anything, and just being locked up entirely. I guess it isn’t really known to be good after all. Alt-tab does nothing. The windows key does nothing. ctrl-alt-del does something, but doesn’t bring up the task manager menu. It just wiped all icons off the screen.

OK, trying safe mode one more time. It is taking several minutes and is still just a black, blank desktop with an arrow mouse cursor and the words safe mode in each corner of the screen. I’ll give it 5 more minutes before I reinstall the OS. You hear me, computer?! You have 5 minutes.

Well, it took longer than 5 minutes. I had dinner, cooled down and then looked at the computer. It eventually was in safe mode and I could run AVG anti-virus. It is still scanning after about an hour and has found no threats. Just the fact that I recently changed the kernel and related dlls. Again, I’m regretting that 80GB system disk. I need to put the operating system on a partition that is no bigger than necessary.

I really hope this finds and fixes a virus, because I have no idea what else could be causing this dramatic change in behavior.

Two hours later, it is still looking through my disk for something nasty and has found nothing. It is now flipping through my old Everquest files. Ha, I didn’t know that those still existed.

Four hours later, the scan is done and it found nothing wrong. But it says that there are 4 files in the virus vault, all trojan horses. Three of the infected files are WoW updaters. The other is a Sunbird installer.

Installed AVG Rootkit via a USB stick and then rebooted. It didn’t honor my request to go to safe mode and the boot seemed to come up normal. But before I could get control of the cursor, it blue screened with the message “dumping physical memory” and then rebooted. I mashed the F8 key and then it went into safe mode with networking.

It came up with the error svchost.exe has generated errors and will be closed by windows. You will need to restart the program. Huh. I suppose I should look at some of the error logs.

AVG Rootkit refused to start after the reboot. It said I still hadn’t rebooted. I guess it doesn’t like safe mode.

The event log shows plenty of interesting disk, atapi, service control manager, rasman, remote access, dcom errors. But I can’t see the properties of any of them. The properties button in the menu and right-clicking to ask for properties have no effect.

I guess I have to admit defeat if the OS can’t even show me the event log properties. Time to reinstall. Make that wipe disk and reinstall.

Can’t install without my Product ID, so I had to install Belarc Advisor to decode it from the registry for me. Do I install to a different disk and try to extract some of my files from this one? Or do I wipe it and start fresh? I’m formatting to NTFS as I type. I just could never be sure about cleaning those files…

This looks like a good time to go to sleep. After about 5 minutes, the format is 1% done.

The formatter said it couldn’t format the disk. Perhaps it is damaged. I’ll try deleting all partitions and formatting again. There was a FAT and an NTFS. Hmmm, now I have 61MB of unpartitioned space on an unknown adapter and 76GB on my atapi disk.

When I tried to format, I got a system error and the installer rebooted the system. Huh, real disk failure might actually explain these symptoms better than a virus. But then the installer restarted and saw the disk with the old NTFS partition still intact. I told it delete the files in that partition and re-install and it is now doing it without complaint. We’ll see how far it gets.

While win2k installs, or tries to, I’m browsing to see if XP is still available. If it isn’t and I’m forced to choose between win2k and vista, I’ll choose win2k. But XP is available for $89 from newegg. So I can try that next if this fails.

OK, the win2k install succeeded and now I have a system that boots on its own and doesn’t crawl through molasses. And all my old files and virii are still there. But I have no drivers for motherboard or video. Now where are those driver cds for the motherboard and video card?

I found an Asus CD that looks like it is for the motherboard and an ATI Catalyst CD for the video board. The ATI CD won’t install though. It says I have to set up my VGA settings first. What the. The Asus CD won’t autoplay, so I have to navigate to the win2k directory and run the installer there. That says that it just installed NVIDIA drivers. That’s only mildly scary. I know I have an ATI Radeon R350 video card, but I probably have some Nvidia stuff on the motherboard somewhere… don’t I?

Again, I get this severe warning from the Catalyst installer: Setup was unable to complete the installation. Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup.

What does that mean? I’m guessing it means I have to tell win2k to install some standard ati driver first…

Ahah! I found the pile of CDs that I wanted to be very sure I didn’t lose. So they were of course very well hidden. The drivers I had to install first were NVIDIA motherboard drivers for the GART, ethernet, memory controller and other odd bits. That CD is unhelpfully labled: NFORCE Platform Drivers and Utilities but I have scribbled motherboard drivers on the envelope. And now I’ve written “Install me first” on the envelope too.

Next I have to choose between an ATI Catalyst cd with a 2002 copyright or a 2004 copyright. I’ll pick 2004.

It is demanding to reboot after the motherboard drivers, but refusing to reboot. I have to hit the reset switch.

Huh, the ATI driver still fails to install, same error. Try setting up the vga adapter first.

OK, I tried using the windows “add new hardware” wizard. That allowed me to pick from some ancient ATI drivers. I randomly chose Rage 128 4xAGP. At least that didn’t fail. After a reboot, I’m still stuck at 800×600 and 16 colors (puke). And it still thinks my adapter is a VGASAVE.

Here’s the new plan: remove the fancy video card, set up the onboard video. Then pretend I just bought the fancy new video card and set it up according to manufacturer’s instructions. The reboot after switching to onboard video triggered the new hardware wizard. Cool! I’ve got new onboard video! How do they do that? Ahh, the wizard found a driver it liked on the motherboard driver CD. Nice. But an error occurred during the installation of the device. The driver does not support Win2k. Huh. I never did trust those windows wizards anyway. I try running the installer on the CD again, now that I’m using onboard video… Just starting the motherboard installer, it came up with a new option for installing the video driver. Then it didn’t ask me to click anything, it just installed it. Hehe, then it just rebooted for me too. How considerate.

Wow, look at that, I have more than 16 colors and a resolution of 1280×1024. What a relief. Now I can install my fancy video card. Man, Linux does not make you do this kind of crazy dance. You just have to limit your choices to the 5% of the hardware out there that has drivers for Linux. Then it just works!

The ATI installer is much prettier after getting my video working. They must know that you can’t install their video card unless you have a really kicking video card. Oops, I let ATI install a bunch of junk I don’t want like a media player and control panel. I should have just asked for the video driver.

Oh, and I vacuumed all the cat hair out of the video card while it was unplugged. So now it is fresh as a daisy and ready to be installed AS IF IT WERE A BRAND NEW CARD. There, my computer must have heard that.

Reinstalled the ATI video card… and the driver is VGASAVE and I’ve got 16 colors at 800×600. Bummer. Running the ATI installer again, I get the same error: setup was unable to complete the installation. Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver before running setup.

Before giving up on the ATI installer (maybe this is the wrong CD or something), I try putting the win2k install CD in and telling the add new hardware wizard to look for a standard vga video driver. It can’t find anything.

At this point, I think I have to plug the network back in and look for drivers at ATI’s web site. But when I try to use IE from way back when, it doesn’t render the page well enough to be able to read it. So I have to get Firefox first. Their page is wicked slow and still looks horrible in 16 colors and low res. But I can read it. I go to ati.amd.com/support/driver.html and then fill out the form: win2k, radeon, 9700 series. That gets me to the download for the display driver version 6.2 dated 2/9/2006. They use Akamai, but still the download is really slow. Its just a lousy 12MB. I wonder if my virus is kicking in again or something. Task manager shows the cpu barely working. Too bad this isn’t XP. If it was I could watch the network throughput as well. I’m getting 9KB/sec download. Maybe I’ll try it on another machine… Wow, it really is that slow. A known good machine can’t get that driver either. Akamai must keep that file on the back shelf along with the Donny Osmond mp3s.

Eventually, I got my driver and installed it. It had no problems with the install and told me to reboot. Everything was much better after the reboot. So I guess I have to take back my unkind thoughts about windows drivers from a few paragraphs ago. I just wasn’t using the right driver.

My next visit is to the microsoft update site to see if I can still get updates for win2k. It appears that I can.

OK, I was able to get things mostly working again, got lots of MS updates, ran virus scans, and everything seemed to be normal. But I eventually noticed that the full virus scan never really completed… it rebooted the machine somewhere in the middle. And scandisk never ran to completion either. It ended up with a blue screen of death somewhere in the middle. I even tried booting into Fedora again to let GParted have another shot at formatting the disk, but it failed with some unknown error. So I think the verdict is disk failure instead of virus. Unless it was disk failure because of virus, which is entirely possible but I’m not betting on it. So I ran out to Office Depot, which is the closest thing to an all-night computer store around here. Got there at 7 minutes before closing and picked up the smallest disk I could get. I’ve been complaining about how long this lousy 80GB drive takes to scan. I wanted something nice and small and quick. What is the smallest drive they sell nowadays? 160GB. Fine. I’ll just partition it in half and run some other OS on the other half. Win2k is formatting it right now. But the bummer is that they are too cheap to ship drives with cables anymore. Can’t they throw in a data cable with the drive? They include Google desktop search, toolbar, and picasa. That’s pretty cool. But I’d rather have a data cable right now.

Now is when all this blogging pays off. I can go back and speed through this setup by following my notes.

• win2k install
• reboot
• install motherboard drivers
• reboot
• install IE6 (required by MS update)
• reboot
• install Windows Update
• reboot
• install win2k SP4
• reboot
• install directX (required by video driver)
• reboot
• install proper ati driver
• reboot
•  ???
• profit!!