getting A+ certification. Actually, it was a daughter of one of the
ladies who come in to help my mother with her personal care and stuff.
From what I was told is that it just stopped working and wouldn't boot
past the Windows XP logo screen, and would reboot after a while. Some
other bit was about her Symantec AV reporting she got some worm or
something before things went bad, but then her "subscription" to that
had expired. But in the meantime, they had hooked up the computer of the
lady I had helped with earlier this year.
Without AntiVirus software on it. Yeah, Not Smart, in spite of how much
this daughter thinks she knows. I promised the lady I helped that when
they're ready to put it back on the net, I would finish what I had
started and put in security it needed.
So anywho, before I take a look at the problem system, I get to
installing the security stuff I think will help them with little problem
and worry. Since her RAM is 1G and dual channel, and a nice beefy AMD
Athlon processor, I decide that AVG Free 8.5 is going to work well for
them. After running scans (nothing major thank goodness), I get
Malwarebyte's tool going and it finds stuff. Spybot Search and Destroy
goes in, adding its resident TeaTimer and it finds a few more things. Ad
Aware AE goes in, and this time it doesn't find a whole lot, which is
extra good.
I put in a few more goodies. Firefox 3.5.3 goes in to update what I've
put on there already and then slip in all the security and other goodies
I like and show her how to use NoScript and FlashBlock as well as Ad
Block Plus. With NoScript, when you load up a page and nothing is going
on, allow any of the currently blocked scripts. Note which domains have
blocked scripts (like ad serving domains), and carefully allow or
temporarily allow stuff until the page works. Some pages you temporarily
allow things when you're not going to be there much, some you Always
Allow if you are going to be there much. Just allow enough to make the
page work. I showed her a few examples of what to allow.
Also turned on Cookie handling so she can get to training Firefox what
to block. Same with Ad Block Plus.
Media Player Classic Home Theater edition went in. And then created a
desktop shortcut for her Microsoft Works word processor. She forgot I
put that back in on her HD.
Had that finally nicely locked down and onto the problem computer. Dummy
me though, I took my extra monitor and forgot the power cord... I was
hoping to set up both systems and use the net connected one to look up
solutions while I worked on the other.
Only it didn't get quite that far. I got the problem system hooked up.
one thing I forgot to bring was the diagnostic CD for various things, so
I grabbed a copy there and burned it to a CD.
Her drive was a 200G Seagate, a few years old. It's been across the
country and back. It's probably been left on for long periods without
actually needing to be on.
It was showing its age.
Ran SeaTools off the diagnostic CD. The drive was unable to pass the
Short Test. So I ran the long test. Sector Read errors started popping
up. I could hear a lot of activity by the drive as it ground through the
errors. SeaTools eventually clicked up 99 errors before it stopped. I
ran it a few more times, trying to get it to repair problem sectors. One
early sector it claimed to have fixed resurfaced a bit later as being
bad again.
I had managed to check only the first 4% of the drive (about 8 gigs)
before concluding that any more work on it would not yield anything.
Actually tried to boot the drive into its Recovery partition, and it was
unable to recover. Tried to boot into XP on the primary partition and it
did exactly what she described. Well, the boot process was unable to
complete because it couldn't read part of the drive!
The error pattern was odd. It would get to LBA 74000 or so before it got
errors, would grind through a bunch, then hit a patch it was able to
just sail right through until 17400000 (something like that). So the
entire drive wasn't bad. After some of that, I tried to boot XP on the
drive and it attempted to fix something with the file structure on the
drive, but the actual system files it was still unable to successfully
load.
She'll have to buy a new drive, and she just goes and says she knows a
few people in the service (somewhere, I didn't catch where) that do this
as part of their job (family relatives) and she'll send the drive to
them to see what they can do with it.
About the only way this drive will have any data recovered off it is if
the drive is taken apart and the platters put into another device.
The problem being faced here is her system had a working DVD burner
drive. It wasn't working anymore though. She had pictures on the drive
copied off her camera's memory card. No backups. No burned CDs, no flash
drives, nada. Photos from Italy where they had been for about a year or
so. Not to mention resumes, financial info. Stuff that should at least
be on a thumbdrive!
It would take intensive forensic work on that thing to get anything off
it. IF she's lucky, with a big IF, that drive is put into another
system, any important info should be quickly copied off because that
drive is on its last days. I don't know what kind of damage happened to
it, but the chances of getting things off it aren't very high.
I kinda got the idea that maybe she didn't think I knew what I was
doing, but then I did get the front off her system and pulled the drive
out through the front of the case. ^_^
If anyone else seems to think as I do that her drive is likely done for,
by all means leave a comment saying so. Some drives last a long time,
some don't, it's all relative.
Oh yeah! Almost forgot about the printer! They had tried to hook up an
HP Photosmart printer to it via USB but without installing the drivers
for it. I mean, if you can't find the CD, why bother hooking it up?
Anywho, someone did. And it wouldn't print. I solved that by going to
HP's support website and finding the XP package of basic software and
drivers for the printer. Shut down the 'puter, unplugged the USB cable.
Start it back up, run the driver install, and turned on the printer and
plugged it in when the installer said to. Device was detected and it
prints now. That seemed to surprise her. ^_^
About the only other thing I was unable to work on was a JVC mini
digital video camera. It had a USB plug as well, but they didn't have
any CD of software for it at all. The camera DID have an SD Card slot,
but no card. I told them to get a card (2G would be kinda nice) and use
it with the 'puters many card readers. That would solve the other
problem until they got a CD or whatever for it.
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