What I would do is to use a thumb drive or a CD and back up anything that you dont want to lose. Take your time doing this as I will be leaving in about an hour for Xmas eve and wont be back until late, in the meantime I am going to have on of our windows guys take a look at this and see what he has to say, whatever we do, your MBR is infected and it has to be fixed.
Ok, I'll start working on backing everything up. This might be a stupid question but I have a large internal HD that I use exclusively for file storage and backups…if I backup everything to that HD and then the MBR fix goes badly, my files should still be ok on the backup HD, right? I wouldn't think that the MBR fix would have any impact on a separate HD, but I could be wrong.
I should hopefully have everything backed up by tomorrow night. I'll let you know how everything is going.
As always…thanks for your help! Have a merry Christmas!
A backup external drive would be wonderful, what I would do is start backing everything you dont want to lose to that drive, when your done just unplug the drive, it will not be a part of this fix and once your up and running all your data will be saved, but hang on a bit before you run the fix, have not heard back from the windows team as of yet.
Still waiting , a lot of our staff take some time off during the holidays, have not forgotten about you. Do you have everything backed up and ready to go ?
No problem! Thanks for the update…
I have backed up all my important files on the internal secondary hard drive that I have. I have two external drives that I'm trying to use but I've just been having nothing but problems with them. My computer isn't recognizing them right now. I'm trying to search around for some solutions to get at least one of them working. I know they have both worked in the past.
As far as the general state of my computer, it seems to be getting a bit worse. Ping.exe starts running pretty persistently. Also services.exe has been using a high amount of resources. It's been freezing up A LOT the past two days, where I just have to unplug it and reboot. I feel I may be losing the battle here, unfortunately…
The consensuses is thats its possible if we rebuild the MBR on that one partition it may take the other one with it which will may leave you with unusable space on your hard drive that windows wont recognize, another tech is looking into this also.
I think with all the problems your having I would just bite the bullet and do a format and clean install of windows and be done with it
Be back soon
What do you think about this ?
He does have Acronis installed.
If he has activated Acronis Startup Recovery Manager, then Acronis will display a "pre-windows" option during boot to allow user to press F11 in order to run Acronis Startup Recovery Manager, Otherwise the option times out quickly and ordinary Windows boot options progress.
Since Acronis Startup Recovery Manager occurs "before" Windows dual-boot options, I don't think there will be a problem.
He may have to reactivate the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager option.
With a dual boot system there is a possibility that you could wind up with a never ending loop on the next start up, like I said, with the problems your having I would format and do a clean install of windows, this way your guaranteed all will work and the infection is gone.
Hello!
Yeah, so I bit the bullet so to speak and took my computer in to a local repair shop to get it cleaned. It was just becoming increasingly unstable…freezing constantly and beginning not to recognize drives. It even was giving me a pop up that said that the hardware had changed significantly enough that Windows would need to be re-authorized within 3 days.
I figure my best shot to save my data would be to have it cleaned professionally.
Thanks for walking me through to the point that we were at! The staff here really provide a valuable service. I definitely plan on making a donation to the site.
Well what your doing may be the best choice at this time, they may be able to pin point if its some hardware failure , lets hope not, but they should reinstall windows and you should be good to go.
How did I get infected in the first place ?
Read these links and find out how to prevent getting infected again.
Tutorial for System Restore <– Do this first to prevent yourself from being reinfected.
