Anyone able to give me any ideas where to go from here?
I got asked to look at a laptop, it kept BSODing, I got it, thinking duff driver or something simple. I looked through the logs etc and couldn’t see anything obvious, but what I did notice was the lack of AV, so I went to throw on Avast, failed, the virus database file corrupts on copying to the disk, OK, so it’s a virus, stopping the install of AV to get rid? 3 different AV packages later and nothing will install. so, off to an online scanner, that fails too!
I’ve tried using the avast bootable cd av but it’s xp based and the drive in the laptop is sata so it can’t see it.
I’ve been fighting with this for days, I finally got avast to install so I could do a scan but it found nothing before it corrupted itself again.
I’ve done surface scans, defrags, used the disk scanner in the bios to do a full smart check, fought with it for hours, and I’m coming to the conclusion it’s the sata controller that’s causing it.
Apart from doing a fresh install if its virus based there little hope of combating it in the actual machine.
Most of the stuff I have dealt with I have dealt with by removing the offending drive caddying it up and using another machine to analyse it.
A lot of the viruses out there recognise the AV software and corrupts it on purpose to stop you removing the offending nasty.
If the Virus is in the BOOT sector of the Harddrive there is essentially nothing you can do without isolating the drive as everytime the machine initiates it is loaded up.
That’s why most companies doing this type of work simply advise re-installing from scratch.
run memtest, fails constantly! popped the back open, two memory sticks, same make model etc ripped one out and it runs fine, stick it back in and it fails.
