Wee newbie question

I had what might have been a rootkit or a memory problem (so microsoft support's site told me) and I managed to get the thing to start reformatting. Here're my idiot questions while I wait for it to finish -
1) If it was a memory issue this wouldn't work right? The reformatting and carrying on a usual I mean.
2) If it was rootkit this should clear it out right?
I have an external hard drive which I occassionally turned on to back up a load of photos and such. Could the rootkit still be hiding in there somehow - seeing as it's not part of the reformatting?

I hope I'm not putting you out with such nonsense but for a wee geek like myself these are pertinent issues. Thanks.

 

sorry...irrelevant? It took 3hours to get to 100% formatted and then I got the blue screen with the error STOP 0x0000008E (0xC0000005,0x8087E211,0xF6F02B7C,0x000000) and nothing works or boots in fact.
Any of your wizards know if the little bird who told me this was all a screwed memory problem had his hat on straight or was talking out of his ear?

 

If I understand you correctly, you were advised to reformat your hard-drive and re-install the operating system? Fairly drastic advice . . .

The error message you are getting indicates some hardware malfunction on your system - usually faulty RAM modules . . . but a little more information would be helpful. What operating system are you using, brand and model of motherboard (or of computer, if a commercial rig). Any detail about your computer is helpful in nailing down a solution to the problem.

Spad

 

Hello in there,

Chaslang thanks for the redirection. I was rather worried about what microsoft.support had to say about my original errors and some of the behaviour on my computer that put me thinking woefully about rootkits, hence the malware section.

Spad - yep drastic as it gets I hear. My computer [a Mouse computer - common enough as a competitor to Dell here in Japan I hear but maybe you've not heard of them - was an MDV Advance St6300 B3 (which means nothing to me) with an Intel(R)Core i7 processor (which means a little) running XP3 (that I've got a fair handle on)] was three weeks old when it cacked up and started rebooting itself because of Bootvolume errors before Windows had a chance to boot itself. The company said they'd take it in for checking and repairs which might involve reformatting it along the way so I thought I'd give it a go myself and maybe save the wait for it to come back... the last thing it said to me after a 3 hour reinstalling period was that the NTLDR (Greek to me) was missing and it wouldn't boot at all let alone reboot in perpetuam. The company has it now... hopefully they'll send it back in a few days with some spiffy new memory bits (Japan has an amazing service ethic) and I can get back to trying to play the game I was in the middle of when it rolled over on me.

Given all of that I think that my only serious remaining question is whether or not the things I had saved (mainly photos and Word files) on an external harddrive would be corrupted or contain something which might have started it all. Not that the memory of the PC would ruin that memory but could a rootkit (I hear that reloadmedude and something else often cause what I had) be hiding in there?

Sheesh is that clear enough? I'll try to be more concise next time.

I also picked up a copy of Norton Internet Security 2010 as the free antivirus and spyware kits I was using always had me a little worried.