[pchelpers] Re: Hard Drive Readability

Trudy Alatorre wrote:
> I kept having problems with my internet connection, sometimes it did not 
> work, and sometimes the modem did not seem to work. The man from the cable 
> company said  that 3 people had connected there cables to my internet 
> connection, and he thought that could account for part of my problems. 
>   I also noticed one day the icon for one of my drives had changed, but I 
> thought my daughter had done that. I also found some kind of a data bank in 
> my control panel, but it did not let me see what it was because it was 
> protected by a password. When I noticed my files on the C drive not 
> accessable anymore. I ran four different virus scanners, which all just found 
> little items. I also saw in the security log of the firewall that the same 
> item kept coming back, and it was sometimes allowed and sometimes blocked. 
> When I traced it back it was from some place in China. 
>   I than tried to scan my system with housecall but it did not work, finally 
> housecall Europe worked, but it said it would take 12 hours. When I came back 
> in to the room an hour later, housecall was turned off. By that time my 
> browser was also hijacked and so I decided to just re-install Windows. Yes, I 
> had reformatted the drive, just to be sure. Thank you for your good advice. 
>   Trudy 
>    
>    
>    
>   
> Scott McNay <wizard@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>   
> Hi Trudy,
> Apparently-empty folders have the same cause -- you don't have
> permission to look inside the folder.
> 
> You should be careful; merely reinstalling Windows without
> reformatting the drive (if that is what you're doing) will not
> necessarily get rid of all of the "contamination". Some malware fetch
> and install other malware, so even if you detect and remove the
> original virus, you may still have malicious files on the system. Or,
> your security settings may have been adjusted so that your system is
> more "open" to infection, often in ways which are not easy to detect.
> 
> Many large corporations require that infected systems be wiped
> completely, often including the data, in order to avoid reinfection.
> One of my co-workers usually does the same (but saving data);
> installing fresh tends to be faster when cleaning a badly infected
> system (and about break-even for a moderately-infected system), and
> the system no longer has the typical dead-wood (including junk
> installed by the vendor) that slows it down, and most of the software
> is up-to-date, often with the security adjusted to discourage
> reinfection, plus, of course, there are definitely no contaminated
> files to return and haunt you. Ekhart is another person who is moving
> towards reinstalling instead of cleaning.
> 
> Do you know what virus it was that caused your problem? 
Glad to hear you solved the problem. If you had been able to use the 
passive scan technique, this might have been avoided. Most of you 
probably know how that works by now.
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