Win XP, Current NAV defs, SOMETHING is eating my hard drive

[tradle]

Hi All -

I have a WinXP laptop that has a 28 GB hard drive. I use maybe 3 GB with what I have on the PC. Of late, I've been getting the "out of space" message, and the computer has basically gone further and further down in terms of performance. I have Norton Systemworks 2004 on the PC, and recently updated my virus definitions.

I'm sure that this is a virus, but I cannot get to a point where I can isolate it. NAV is popping up now with re-install messages, a hallmark of every virus that I've ever seen. I can't connect to the internet anymore, and I can't even browse the directory structure using Windows Explorer.

Is all hope lost? Do I FDISK and start over, or can one of you walk me through an alternative that may help diagnose and start to address the issue? I've been out of the PC support/virus annihilation realm for about 5 years now, and really am not privy to current diagnosis and removal techniques.

For starters, I was thinking that booting the PC into safe mode and seeing what I could do from there as a possibility, but with every time that I boot the computer, the virus seems to take up more space, so I'm reluctant to turn the thing on if I'm not going to make any progress.

HELP, PLEASE!

Tim

 

[aquias]

You cannot connect to the web at all? That makes this process much more difficult...

I'd say start off by creating a boot disk from whatever system you're currently on. Either using Norton or Mcafee and have that scan the drive on startup (both systems should walk you through how to create a scanning boot disk).

The next step, would be to go to safe mode and run a virus scan from within safe mode. The hope there will be that the virus can't stop Norton from loading in safe mode.

Once you get the system up and can

A) surf the web
B) Look at the directory structure

We can do more to try and wipe the entire system clean of the bugger.

 

[tradle]

Aquias -

After I wrote that posting, I got bold and booted into safe mode. What I found not only troubled me, it angered the heck out of me.

I HAD an installation of Oracle 9i Personal (essentially the full install of the Oracle 9i database and all associated tools), and found that the C:\oracle was eating up 15.2 GB of space - up a FULL 10 GB since install. It seems that the logging of the Apache HTTP server, along with the Java engine that actually ran in two instances of itself that themselves logged every forsaken behavior on the machine had literally been doing what I thought was the work of a virus. With every boot, more records were written to the logs. 10 GB worth in less than a year. I uninstalled every component, deleted all of the directories, and have been running Norton Systemworks to find and kill all instances of spyware.

Thanks so much for the reply - apologies to all for what was an application issue.

Regards,
Tim

 

[aquias]

Actually,

I appreciate this post more than you know. We've just installed personal oracle to all our systems for a new application. It gives me something to watch out for on the server and client side.