I’ve been battling some viruses and rootkits on a Dell laptop running
XP Home. After running Avast, AVG, Spybot, etc scans for the last
couple of weeks, the viruses are still popping up. I even tried using
Firefox and Safari for internet. Still the viruses and spyware keep
showing up…
So, I finally decided to run an AVG scan on the drive as an external
harddrive connected to another PC via USB (D:\ drive). The scan
cancelled after reaching a rootkit or virus in my temp files and
“repaired” it. I restarted the computer and started another scan. It
made it almost all of the way through, but when it got into the
Windows directory, the computer lost connection to the external
harddrive. The scan cancelled again and said it had found and
repaired several threats. I could still see the external drive in
Windows Explorer, listed as D:\, BUT I could not open D:\ and view
the files anymore.
I then tried to put the drive back in the laptop and boot up. It won’t
bootup. It does right after the BIOS screen. I tried running the XP
Setup CD > Recovery Console > chkdsk /r. It says the drive appears
to have one or more unrecoverable errors and won’t continue.
I also booted from the Windows XP Home CD to tease it into thinking I
was reinstalling XP Home. It shows the partitions (one for Windows
and the other for recovery partition), but it can’t tell that the Windows
partition is NTFS anymore. It says “unknown” file structure.
I have used Bart PE’s CD to run checks on the sectros and they all
appear to be fine.
What in the world is going on? Did the virus/rootkit kill access to the
drive’s contents? Any ideas for how to bridge back to the files (if that
makes sense)? It’s strange that I can see the drive in the Windows
setup menu (when it asks to choose a drive to install XP on). Usually a
dead harddrive won’t even get that far. I’m really thinking the virus or
rootkit killed access to the NTFS file structure or something. Didn’t
know it was possible, but there’s no telling what virus and rootkit
authors can think of nowadays.
Any advice is good advice. Thank for your time!