Something Strange

I have never seen this before...

I was booting into Windows and discovered NTLDR.EXE was missing. So i booted into Linux, mounted the drive and discovered all the files were gone except a few folders. I do not recall deleting everything.

This may or may not be related, but a week or so ago, while working, got a blue screen (a memory dump, no clear indicator of where it went wrong), and upon cold boot the MBR was missing. Okay, I did a fixboot and everything was fine. Now it is this.

I am thinking:

1. A virus?

2. Trojan (I did find a "downloader.trojan" but I think it was for spyware and not a server/client type like Sub7, etc)?

3. The HDD is dying?

4. Somebody actually cared to delete everything?

Insights would be nice. Thanks.

Well my initial thoughts are:

1. Virus..............possibly, but I don't recall one with these exact symptoms.

2. Trojan...........not unless it was very badly written. The object of a trojan is to gain contol of a functioning system.

3. Hardware.............that sounds very likely, get the diagnostics programs from the manufacturers site, and make sure that anything that is left that is of value (including your linux partition) is backed up. I think that you ought to do this anyway, if only for your own peace of mind.

4. Malicious person?...............I somehow doubt that............either they would format the whole HDD or pull your chain in a much more subtle way. Also, skiddies pride themselves in the number of "bots" that they "own" so I cannot see one killing his pride and joy?

Like I said, initial thoughts and I have made a number of assumptions, but I suspect hardware, and I think the HDD is the first item to check.

Cheers

thehorse13 suggested the HDD is hosed and said I should try GWSCAN. I'll need to buy some floppies to see if that is the case.

Yes you would have to do the same to run the manufacturer's diagnostics as well. If you spend a lot of time trouble shooting then a RW/CD and/or thumb drive are the answer as you can get a lot of tools on them and keep them up to date :)

I agree with Hoss.............the HDD does look favourite at this stage in the race (sorry Hoss, couldn't resist that :D )

Cheers

Donkey Punch, certainly sounds like a corrupted file table or something else with the HW. Before you go making a ton of floppies, try the Ultimate Boot CD, it has many major HDD manufacturers utilities on it already, plus several hardware diagnostic programms, and if you get the full blown one (both are free) it has the INSERT live linux distro.

One CD-R for a bunch of tools, and then CD-R\W's to burn from INSERT would help you out a lot faster than a stack of floppies.

zencoder: sounds good to me. I am checking it out right now.

Quote:

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Originally posted here by Donkey Punch
thehorse13 suggested the HDD is hosed and said I should try GWSCAN. I'll need to buy some floppies to see if that is the case.

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I've had the same problem before. I formatted/reloaded the box and it happened a week later.
The HD was dying.

Replaced HD, reloaded... its been fine since.

I had the same problem on an older PC I was working on that was using WinNT, blue screen and "psysical memory dump" then it froze.. when I restarted the MBR was missing, ripped out the HDD and put it into my main PC and it looked like Windows had deleted itself somehow. *shrug*

Oh well, if I was a Microsoft OS I'd probably commit suicide too..




EDIT: On a side note, there was nothing wrong with the HD.. it has been "recycled" and runs Slackware very smoothly. Looked to me like an OS problem but I could be wrong (doubt it was a virus, I don't download any unknown programs or go to any other sites aside from a few I frequent.. but I could be wrong in that aspect as well).

I ran the utils and discovered there were a lot of read errors. The MBR is fine, but that does not mean that will die too soon because the GRUB is on that drive. So I am going to install GRUB on this drive where linux is...

I cannot give greenies because it is not the same as money or a good shagging, so it is the thought that counts.

Hm, nothing was wrong with the hard drive... I can belive that. I am thinking all the torrents have caught up with me and something might have messed up the filesystem. I can always try a low level format to lose everything including the MBR, reformat, and reload...

However, the cost of an HDD is less than losing all that code I did... like it is worth anything anyway. It has serious sentimental value to me and probably nobody else ;)

K, the files are back by fixing the MBR, and backing stuff up now before it takes another dump.

Well, for all.

On your safari on the internet, you are never safe, especially when ur riding on M$ IE. Probably should take a look at Brian Hook's ActiveX experiance.

"I can make an OCX that basically formats your hard drive, stick it on a Web page with a tag, and if your security settings are set low enough, you'll start formatting your hard drive the minute you visit my Web page. "

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link : http://bookofhook.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=387

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