Desktop

I am a private technician serving mostly homes and small offices.

I have run into a similar phenomenon on 2 computers within the last week, and wonder if it is virus related. In both cases, the computers had up-to-date Norton Anti-virus, and one had a clean install of Windows 2000 a week ago.

The issues seem to be:
1. even when shut down normally, upon boot, the "A disk check was scheduled" screen comes up, most often resulting in a hefty collection of chkfile fragments or the like. Cross-linked files are sometimes identified. One computer, running Windows 98, had collected 1.1 GB in temp files within the week.

2. When I placed the hard disk in my computer to check it, Windows XP reported that there was a chance that the data was corrupted, and that it will try to reconstruct. The result was total gibberish on the disk.

3. Various viruses detected and deleted or quarantined by Norton.

4. Requests to dail up by the computer.

The mbr seems to be totally ripped apart. A colleague suggested that this might be related the the MyDoom virus, but I haven't seen anything in the literature that indicated this.

Anyone seen this or have any ideas?