Mal Ware Warning!!!

[Highlander 0]

My son downloaded a program [inadvertently, he says] on my desktop called Zondo. According to my son he was looking for a guitar tuner on line for his new guitar and this popped up. It apparently by-passed all the pop-up blockers, McAfee and all the other stuff I've got, but it popped up anyway. The pop-up window had the two usual bottons following the "do you want to download Zondo", but they were switched [cancel and yes] and he clicked on the wrong one, just out of habit. It downloaded and installed.

 

Yesterday morning when I got on, all I could see for layers and layers were pop-ups, You know the kind - You're the 1 millionth visitor" and "free software", etc. I closed them down, probably a dozen or so. Within the next few minutes, another bunch popped up. I decided to to get rid of the program right then and there. I used the Windows "Add/Remove Program" and all went well. When it was done, there was a message telling me I needed to re-boot. So I did...

 

The machine never booted again. My son ran a series of diagnostics in safe mode and confirmed with manufacturer that the hard disk was shot. The tech told us that certain of the mal-wares that are out there will do this to certain HDDs.

 

My son agreed to make it right and at the present he is on the way to the local Tiger Direct to pick up a new HDD.

 

Let this serve as a warning to you all, that mal-ware operators intend to do damage to your machines and be very careful with anything that looks like Zondo!

 

I'm hoping to be back in operation soon... [using my work laptop right now]

[erialc 2]

 

Eek Highlander!

 

Scary stuff...I hope it all gets repaired/replaced without to hefty a charge.

 

 

^^ to the Mal-Wares out there!

[Schot 407]

Oh wow Highlander. That really spoils the day doesn't it.

 

Well I can honestly say I know EXACTLY how you feel, lol. What with pc woes here at home.

I'll definitely watch out for that zondo. Thanx for the heads up.

 

I hope there isn't any risk of lost important data.

[Highlander 0]

Well, it's finally concluded... What an ordeal.

 

We installed the new hard drive, and my son figured out how to get the damaged hard drive accessable. He backed-up all our important documents and files. Everything worked just fine, the new [and much larger] hard drive performs very well. Then on a lark we decided to take the old hard drive and reformat it to see if we could possibly use it again. That happened yesterday. Boy did things get funky after that.

 

When I got up this morning, I booted the computer as usual and weird things started happenning. The mouse didn't work, but the hard drives were just a whirrin'. I could get a few mouse movements detected from time-to-time and opened the Task Manager to see what was going on. Maxed Out at 100% CPU usage! Oh no! But, it looked like progress was being made, slowly, but surely.

 

About an hour later I got a pop up that said "L:\$Mft - Delayed write failed due to hardware or network failure, all data lost." Very serious problem, that's the Master file table. Thankfully, the drive designation matched the old hard drive. We removed the old hard drive, rebooted and things are back to normal.

 

The final analysis was the malware actually corrupted some segments on the old hard drive. And the old hard drive did, in fact have some mechanical problems and was about to fail anyway. To the scrap heap with you, little bugger....

 

Anyway back in business now with my desktop at a total cost of $79.99 + tax for the new Seagate 320gb SATA hard drive and quite a few hours of my time and son's time to get it all working.

[erialc 2]

@ that old hard drive!!

 

OMG Remind me to glare at my kids the next time they even so much as squint at my pc.....it is something I think we can all learn from though that stuff worms it's way in and BOOM!

 

 

It's great to have you back though....and you know it's worth that $80 to get you back here....drinks are on me I'll see you in the bar!

 

[Firefly 0]

*Firefly powers up the NAS box and does a back-up, a virus scan and a spyware sweep.

 

Thanks for the info....I'll aviod looking for guitar tuners and other nasty things.

[Guest gogoblender]

Freaky story

And a very scary one as well

I'm always super extra careful when I click on anything.

Ty fer the heads up...I'm gonna double the caution .

Glad yer story turned out okay Highlander

 

gogo

[Guest Bef]

Run the free version of Kill Disk (bootable cd) and clean the old hard-drive completely; I had a similar issue with an old harddrive and this did the trick...

 

http://www.killdisk.com/

 

GL.