Strange happenings at the Peel house

Well, I have this problem with the computer that may be hardware, may be software, or may be a virus/trojan/worm.

The thing started reacting slower and slower. It started taking up to ten minutes to boot and would sometimes reboot spontaneously several times. I got messages like "One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency", "This copy of Windows is not a genuine copy", and "Hard disk failed".

I ran Norton and AntiVIR on the drive and it found nothing; but in the events log -- while there still were events -- it would show that AntiVIR was shut down for three seconds and then restarted. It also had numerous application errors involving IE and Dr Watson.

The faults started on 6-11 and on 6-15 the unit refused to boot at all. Here are some of the fault message I got in the events log on 6-11:

6-14 went like this:

I then ran dskchk on the drive to see if there were any bad clusters, etc and it got a clean bill of health.

After the thing finally died, I installed a former 40G drive and did a destructive system restore to that drive. I then installed the former C: drive as a slave drive and everyting was there as it was before. I ran Norton and AntiVIR on it and it came up clean. I ran dskchk and it came up clean. I ran Maxtor's utilities from the MaxBlast 4 CD and it also came up clean.

Soooooooo. To make a long story longer ... I then did a non-destructive system restore on the errant drive and when it started the restore it had the message "ERROR 2: E:/PRELOAD WINDOWS.W32 MISSING" but seemed to run normally otherwise -- that is until it came time to boot it. It was as if I had done nothing at all.

It hangs as soon as the HP window that states "F1 Setup, F10 System Restore" disappears. I have a blank screen with a blinking cursor at the top of the screen. However, when I then replaced it with the 40G drive and slaved it again everything was there like it was supposed to be.

I hate to do a format and destructive restore on it just to find that it is the drive that is at fault and lose everything. I was able to get a backup of much of the drive before it took a royal s--- but I would like to make it run again. I have also been able to recover files from it as a slave drive.

Anyone out there have any ideas on this?

By the way, the restore point portion of the drive had never worked so there is no need to go there as an option.

The unit was exactly as I wanted it to be. Now I have to redo the entire thing over again. For those who would ask "Why didn't you use the restore utility in XP which would have saved your a--?" The answer to this is "HP strips out the backup utility from their licensed copy of XP and then attempts to sell you an HP backup utility."

 

I got that message only once. The copy I have came with the machine and has been operating for three + years. I have also gotten updates and support from Microsoft. Why I got that message is a mystery. It also stated that I might be a victim of software piracy; but if that were true Circuit City and HP would have been shut down long ago. This was a brand new machine.

Being locked out pretty well describes what is happening to me. When I tried the non-destructive restore on the 120G drive wouldn't that have restored a new copy to the drive that is legitimate? The restore disk -- 7 CDs -- were created by me from this machine pursuant to the HP instructions.

As for parallel anti-virus programs:

I had AntiVIR installed on the old 120G drive. Norton was purged. When I restored the 40G drive Norton was also restored to that drive. I then updated and ran the Norton against the 120G drive which was now in the slave position. It came up clean.

After that, I did another restore on the 40G drive to practice that I was doing it right before I tried it on the 120G drive and possibly screw it up. I then downloaded AntiVIR and ran it against the 120G drive and it came up clean. That's why it appears that I have two anti-virus programs running in parallel but I do not. I know that is a great big no-no.

AntiVIR is my anti-virus program of choice. Norton sucks out loud.

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.

 

I had a long discussion with HP and they said that if I could not get the thing to restore non-destructively -- which I could not -- I would have to do a destructive restore. I went ahead and backed up everything to the 40G drive and then did the coup 'd grace which worked perfectly -- if by "perfect" one means that the unit is virtually and literally three years old and needs everything brought up to today's standards.

Thanks for the help.

This one can be closed.