How was your system affected? This sounds really bad if it made it through 2 firewalls…of course if it’s an email attachment that’s different. Or if it attached itself to something you downloaded. A firewall is only good for blocking scanners and network intruders.
How did it cost you $500? It didn’t kill your HDs did it?
badmana It hasn’t cost me that much yet but I’m going to have to take it to the shop to get all the information retrieved because it wiped out/corrupted Windows XP… This is the error message I’m getting:
" Windows could not start because the following info is corrupt or missing.
<Windowsroot>\System32\NTOSKRNL.exe.
Please reinstall a copy of the above file."
I can’t get into the desktop, startup screen or anything.
Hi pencilpusher.
Have you tried running a repair from your XP CD?
Daizy
Daizy Yes I have but I can’t get to any screen except the one that says what I posted a few minutes ago so I can’t RUN anything 
Check your BIOS for your Boot Sequence. It should be “CDROM” on the first position. Your XP CD is not booting.
DO NOT let anyone fool with your PC. You haven’t lost your data yet. I would suggest maybe posting your problem in GQ. Although this is not a tech board,there are some really good IT techs hanging around.
You might want to skim through Billy’s suggestions on how to fix this.
I’m a little lost on how you decided it was a virus?
Daizy
Have a buddy who, 12 years ago, decided he wanted a PC more than anything in the world. Why? Cos he wanted to WRITE VIRII. He wanted to be a hardcore hacker and write a huge, self-replicating virus. Luckilly, he didn’t get his own PC until 2-3 years later, after he’d talked to a lot of people in the field. He’s now quite a competent IT security admnisitrator, and one of the most rabid anti-virus-programmers I’ve ever met. Does my heart good to know that such dick-headedness isn’t incurable.
pencilpusher: I feel for you! What a waste of time, money, and emotional energy.
But wow…it really seems like a lot of these posters doubt the veracity of your story. There have been challenges to your math, your spending priorities, your anti-virus software, the plausibility of a virus breaking two fire walls, your chanting choices (OHM) ………………and yes this small issue of just how you are posting these messages if your computer is on the blink. Are you at the library?
hilltopper no I’m on MY personal computer. The one with the problem is my husbands puter.
Er, yeah, that’d be your kernel, which is the core of the operating system. Without that, nothing runs. That’s one efficient virus.
Of course, my reply is about 20 minutes too late, and not too accurate to boot. Phooey.
From all the indications it’s a virus but it COULD be hardware related. The symptoms started yesterday with different applications becoming corrupt one after another. It started after I opened an email from a coworker that had some info needed for my work. I don’t know if the email was corrupt but it was scanned both before download and after (before opening it) and nothing showed as corrupt. I’m really hoping it’s not hardware related… :eek:
If it’s XP, you should be able to do a System Restore and go back to when it was working. We just talked Coldfire through it in a different thread.
If it deleted a file (boot up on a floppy if you have one and run a search) then it’s either one strange virus or your HD ran into a bad sector (it’s happend to me on a $500 IBM deskstar).
Boot on your XP CDROM…it will work. Your BIOS might not be set right but windows will 100% boot as long as your BIOS is intact (which it most likely is).
Boot up, run a DOS only virus program (just to cover your bases) then run scandisk…it’s probably a lost cluster or worse, a bad sector (if you run into a bunch of errors including directory errors and such, you’re probably SOL).
that particular file can be extracted (if it’s the only one missing which I doubt) via the cab files in your CD. Pre-win XP allowed you to extract said files. XP should be similar.
It’s a good thing you have a second computer. You can tranfer via floppy all the programs you need to fix this.
Whats the cite and I’ll see if I can follow it
or you can IM me at Mastersnaja@msn
Wait a minute. You’re not going to be able to use system restore, if you can’t boot. Though, that would be lovely.
Again, I still think your best bet is the CD boot and repair/ recovery.
Daizy
crap Meant to add… unless you do it through a command prompt.
CD repair/recovery is your only option. NToskernel means “NT Operating System Kernel” which is the drivers for your sound and video card and everything else it takes to run GUI. (Graphical User Interface). System Restore works inside the GUI and is a piece of shit holdover from ME.
[hijack]
If I caught a guy or gal sending viruses, I’d print out the entire content of my hard drive in binary form on a dot matrix printer, with the ‘green bar’ paper (18" wide) and forcefeed it to them.
And they’d have to eat the tear-off feedroller hole things, too.
[/hijack]
Tripler
That’s assuming they find a dot matrix printer. And buy it themselves.