Boot Sector Virus... Experts Please Help 2

[hesaloser]

Hey all,
I’m trying to help a user out with their home PC running win2k with the latest and greatest MS updates, SP 4 ‘an all.
Long story short when you boot the computer you receive the following:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0x820B8030, 0xc0000006, 0x0000000000, 0x00000000) INACCESIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

When you boot into safe mode the same error as above is displayed.

I created a boot-disk on a known clean machine, write-protected the disk physically, booted to the command prompt. Attempted to change directory to C: partition, and I receive the following, “Invalid drive specification”. I thought maybe a boot sector virus had re-labeled the partition so I went through them all A-Z:, no luck except A: and B: of course for 1.44mb disks. What do you think should be my next step?

I was hoping I could first run an AV from command prompt, then I was hoping I could issue a FDISK /MBR command. I’m not sure how to move forward, any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in Advance,
hesaloser

 

[electronicsfreak]

Take this drive and slave it to an xp machine then run a virus scan that way. Or you can take a look at bartpe

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

There is a point in wisdom and knowledge that when you reach it, you exceed what is considered possible - Jason Schoon

 

[Roadki11]

wow, talk about nostalgia, i havent heard of or seen a boot sector virus for about 10 years or more, goes right along with a bios virus(geez im old). Taken me back to my 386 and 486 days. i doubt its a boot sector virus, more likely a nasty corruption or a drive failure. save your self the time and just try to fdisk it, delete the partitions and recreate them, that will tell you quick if its a drive failure or not. sounds like an old pc anyway, good rebuild would make it 3x as fast. your boot disk wouldnt work if the drive is formatted ntfs, very few people think to make or have a ntfs boot disks, but i guess the drive could be fat32 you didnt specify. i use an app called erd commander to try and recover unbootable or dead drives, works great, but its not free. if the drive has "must recover" data like 10 years of digital pics and they have no backups you dont want to destroy them. may opt for a professional recovery solution. electronicsfreak’s idea may work also, could be a bad ide controller who knows, if it works you could recover valuable data. If the system has no valuable data I wouldn’t waste a great deal of time trying to save it, tell them to get a new box as im sure its old.

Just my 2 cents,



RoadKi11

"This apparent fear reaction is typical, rather than try to solve technical problems technically, policy solutions are often chosen." - Fred Cohen

 

[hesaloser]

Yeah i may have jumped the gun when i said i have a boot sector virus, but hey, it got both of your guys attention, so it couldn't have been all that bad! I am ruling out a failed drive, I was able to successfully slave the drive in an XP machine, and I ran AVG on the drive, which found nothing. I'm going to try to pull all the necessary data they would like to keep today if I get around to it. I am still unsure what initially caused the problem, i'll see what happens when i clean the drive up and then pop it back in the original machine. Maybe like you said there is a problem with the IDE controller, i dunno. The drive contains a bunch of pictures and e-mails they would really like to keep, just like everyone else no back-ups have ever been completed. 17 gigs of data, NTFS. Do you guys know of any diagnostics software for windows based pc's thats worth its weight in gold?

Thanks for your ideas and help,
greatly appreciate it!

 

[electronicsfreak]

A couple free ones. Memtest for ram.

memtest

http://www.memtest.org/

Hard drive manufacturers usually have software for their own drives.

Seagate/Maxtor

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

Western Digital

http://support.wdc.com/download/

There is a point in wisdom and knowledge that when you reach it, you exceed what is considered possible - Jason Schoon

 

[gilbee]

I'm new here, and have run into AVG's "unavailability" -
I did a system restore because of several problems, and it
seemed to kill AVG 7.5.Somthing about the kernell couldn't
activate. Since I couldn't get the tech support from the machine, I googled, and got a box to fill out. They wouldn't accept my License number (arrggghhh). So, I looked up my receipt for the license renewal, and tried to
send that. "The website has timed out". When I tried to re-enter it, "IE cannot display this website". I finally downloaded a free version and ran the "repair installation"
and got AVG running. It found some old (months ago)3 Trojan
horses, and apparently cleared the machine. I'm still waiting for a response from AVG....they simply do not respond - has anyone else run into their stone wall?

 

[electronicsfreak]

Try giving them a call

Tel. 866-833-5727

There is a point in wisdom and knowledge that when you reach it, you exceed what is considered possible - Jason Schoon