I have a system here that’s driving my crazy. I took it out of service a while back because it had a bunch of issues that pointed to a badly corrupted OS and/or some kind of deep virus problem. I did a bare-metal rebuild, including setting the BIOS to system defaults and full-formatting both the 250GB boot drive and 1TB data drive, and it’s still logging off and rebooting itself after about 2 minutes.
It’s an ASUS M4A88T-M mobo with an Athlon II CPU, 8GB RAM and an Nvidia 260. It ran fine for several hours of OS install, and basic configuration. I reinstalled Adobe CS5 on it and left it running the last few minutes of that task. This morning, it was in a reboot cycle.
It boots, gives me the login screen, and then once I select one of the two user accounts it loads the desktop, freezes the mouse pointer once or twice, and then drops to “Logging Off” and “Shutting Down”… and restarts. I think if I leave it at the login screen it will reboot in a longer time. The disks activity light is virtually solid the entire time; it’s REALLY hammering away at something.
I can’t help but think it’s got something to do with CS5, but I can’t get it to stay up long enough to deactivate the installation - I already gave up on the prior setup and just hoped Adobe would let the activation pass (and it apparently did). That won’t happen a second time in two days.
Any clue what class of flaw or bug would cause this graceful, but instant logoff and reboot sequence?
Reboots like this are generally a corrupted system driver in the log on sequence or the system is hitting something attached to the motherboard (video card, external drive, whatever) that’s giving it a bellyache. Adobe CS should not cause this issue unless it’s inserting itself in the logon.
Since you cannot access the system if it is constantly re-booting I would try removing hardware piece by piece first to see if you can pinpoint the hardware issue. If the system has onboard video try removing the video card first and using the MB video and see if the problem stops. If it does you need to re-slot the video card (if possible) or check the BIOS to see if it is set to defer to external video cards and there is no conflict.
I am suspecting some fragment of Windows installer code, trying to complete some installation or cleanup detail. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense as the system ran stably for quite a while before starting the behavior - unless a late CS5 update poked the buggy spot, which again doesn’t make sense since this install hasn’t yet been updated.
I did all that and every other thing on the prior installation, with no effect. The only added hardware is the video card, two HDDs and the optical drive, so there’s not a lot to remove. I will try that and then see if I can manually clean out the pending installer list - I know that exists somewhere, forget where to find it.
So damned frustrating. I rarely have systems fail (like, this one’s twin, running CS4) and rarely have trouble pinpointing and fixing the problem when they do. This one has eluded a LOT of effort.
UPDATE: (which is a joke, son, I say, a joke): I ran a startup recovery (and removed the video card) and the system is stable again. There is a huge list of failed OS updates, one or more of which is undoubtedly the cause. I will work through the list of updates, installing and researching each one, until I find the trouble-maker. I’ve run into this on other systems, where a specific MS update chokes on a specific setup.
I am not sure when the system DLed and installed those updates; it must have been last night while the system sat here waiting for me.
It was a TDSS bootkit virus so nasty and evasive that several prior searches had failed to find it AND it survived a bare-metal disc format and OS install. I think a Windows attempt to fix a faulty update made it visible, Window Malware Removal Tool beheaded it, and I quickly grabbed TDSSkiller to stomp it out. All clean; all updates (143 of them) installed; system stable and running.
The virus was likely responsible for the rebooting and the failure of a critical security update to install, leading to the cascade of other problems. Wow. This was by far the nastiest piece of malware I’ve ever had to deal with.
You might be interested to read this pretty thorough forensic investigation into Who’s behind the TDSS botnet. You might also be interested to read the first link in that article that details how those people were renting your PC (and those of others) to provide their customers with proxies to use for anonymous internet access.
Yeah… To be on the safe side, you might want to document this all thoroughly, because it’s possible there were some pretty nefarious activities taking place through your PC and internet connection.