And let’s point out the obvious: if the system is not letting you delete them, it is because THEY ARE BEING USED. If the user is a virus, get rid of the virus. If the user is a crucial app, then don’t touch it!
Why exactly did you start waging this war against your computer without knowing what you’re doing?
Also, don’t use that gparted crap. Use Acronis Disk Director (heir to the late Partition Magic). It actually knows what it’s doing.
I dunno, I don’t get any viruses. Maybe once a year on one of my many comps. Patch your system regularly, don’t open spam attachments, don’t click those stupid web ads that promise to fix your computer, and use Vista’s UAC.
I really don’t know what you must be doing to be getting them. Of all the things that pisses me off about computers (and there are many), viruses isn’t one of them.
Theres too much technical stuff on this post to read through it all again so sorry if this has been mentioned already.
Try a Windows repair. Boot from your installation disk and choose the SECOND repair option. That is after the license agreement page when it asks what drive you want to install Windows in there should be a repair option.
With this most of Windows original files will be “repaired” without loosing any data.
If you need to delete “Locked” files try this free program:-
That’s just life in the big city, Stan. As the Firesign Theater sagely observed long before the arrival of personal computers, “Dealing with today’s complex World of the Future is like having bees live in your head. But, there they are!”
So, get over it and fork it out. Experts can make do without these user-friendly commercial tools, but you’d have to pay many orders of magnitude more to become one yourself. Your problems are much too complex for any of us to be able to usefully hold your hand through it all. And don’t blame malware for such a mess as that which you are describing; a goodly portion of the blame must be appointed to the chicken farmer in the mirror.
The title of another Firesign Theater record is “Everything You Know is Wrong!”, so, acknowledge that those words apply to you and put up the cash to help make things right. Free and open-source software can be extraordinarily useful and powerful, but when you need help you usually have no alternative than to beg people on message boards to help you (hint, hint). I’ve had to do that myself far more often than I’m proud of, but there are times when one’s problems are so severe and messy that we’d have to physically be in the same room to provide sufficient help.
If yous pays yers money, you are entitled to get Professional Help. Examine the official documentation for the truly great open-source media player VLC to see what I’m getting at. In this world, and perhaps in the next, you’re on your own.
Acronis Disk Director comes with (or allows you to create one if you download the software) a bootable CD that’s actually linux under the hood. Borrow a friend’s computer to do this if you don’t want to wait for Acronis to ship you a copy in the mail. The user interface is far superior to the various recovery and repair capabilities of the Windows boot/recovery CD (which has failed me 85% of the time) and you can delete and format whatever the hell you want with no problems. You can copy a good partition wherever you want, including directly over the partition you’re having problems with. I just recommend avoiding “automatic mode” and use “manual mode” instead.
And with BootIt NG, you can force whatever partition you want to be the “C:” drive. It’s quite obvious that your BIOS and/or other system software has been set so that your “D:” drive is actually the bootable Windows root, which is why you can’t delete the swap and other files there. Select “Start -> Run…” and type in %SYSTEMROOT% (including the percent signs). The drive and folder that opens is the actual Windows installation that’s running. I’m guessing that it will be D:\Windows.
That’s true, but there’s simply no stopping or escaping it, even if you switch to linux or a Mac. Perhaps you could find yourself an IBM 1401 or something that would be immune to malware, but only if you ensured you never connected it to a phone line or a network (not that you’d have the option, really).
Even chicken farmers have to deal with infection and viruses, whether they use a computer or not, and the biological malware is getting worse, too. But as others have observed in this thread, with the right tools your computer will be more than adequately safe. This malware thing is just another game of predator-prey one-upmanship, and the good news is that a commercial software company can afford to pay a large group of security experts (including reformed hackers and malware authors) to battle effectively one malevolent malware creator at a time. You don’t want to live without health insurance (hooray, Obama and the House Democrats!), and likewise, you don’t want to live without top-notch malware protection.
Er, um, that’s you Stan. And average as well as expert users need paid software with paid tech support and frequent updates as new threats emerge. My malware tools get several updates per day! Without them, you’ve got to face the bees on your own and without protection.
I’m certainly not one to defend what goes on in Redford, but it is absolutely impossible for any computer or any operating system to prevent malware infections if it’s connected in any way – even via floppy disks – to the outside world, save perhaps various embedded systems such as those that run your car and television (and even they can potentially be subject to various exploits when your car, say, is connected to the repair shop’s computers…).
I cannot help but strongly suspect that Turing, Mauchly and Eckert, and John von Neumann (the brilliant intellectual thief who stole Univac’s / Eckert-Mauchly’s / Goldstine’s ideas for a stored program computer) all foresaw the inevitability of malware. If you can interact with a computer and write to its program or data stores, you can infect it.
So unless you discard all your personal computers and live the life of a modern-day Luddite – like few, if any, chicken farmer in the U.S. has done – you’re never, ever, ever going to be safe from malware. Buy some frequently updated commercial anti-malware utilities (do NOT choose Norton / Symantec as your vendor!), install them, run their active agents at all times, let them update themselves often, and scan your entire system at high-detection levels at least every month, and, ideally, use Kaspersky’s vulnerability detector, and you’ll be fine.
It’s just life in the big city. “Live it, or live with it”, as “4 or 5 Crazee Guys” would instruct you…
Which reminds me, since I’m on yet another long-winded roll, of the very first mass “malware” infection, an interesting story which is quite instructive as a cautionary tale. I fell “victim” to it myself, which I was actually happy about, as were the other “victims”. I first studied Computer Science on a campus with a UNIVAC 1100 series multi-million dollar mainframe running UNIVAC’s (proprietary, as were they all in those days) Exec 8 for it’s highly regarded OS. At the very same time, a programmer named John Walker (not the spy) wrote a fun little self-propagating game program for UNIVAC Exec 8 that he appropriately named ANIMAL.
ANIMAL was akin to early grandmaster software philosopher Joseph Weizenbaum’s famous early AI-like program ELIZA. When you ran it, it asked “Think of an animal…”, then it presented a series of 20-questions-like queries that it used to determine which animal you were thinking of (in the cases where a previous user had correctly described that animal in Yes/No questioning). If the questioning didn’t lead to an answer in its pre-existing database, it asked you to name the animal and then differentiate it from all other animals it already “knew” of. If the animal you named was already in its database but your answers didn’t lead there, ANIMAL would lead you through additional questioning to try to disambiguate your responses from those of earlier users. For those days in the mid 1970’s anyway, many considered it to be “fun”.
But Walker had written ANIMAL for an ulterior, and cautionary, purpose: To warn the world of the danger of what would eventually become known as software viruses (or Trojan Horses, to be more specific).
You see, considering the hopelessly asocial people early programmers especially were, playing ANIMAL was what passed as a “fun game” in those, pre-Grand Theft Auto (hell, pre-Adventure) days. So if you saw someone playing it, you naturally asked for a copy so you could play, too. Before long, these requests for copies dominated nearly all of Walker’s time, so, with eyes wide open and with full knowledge of what would happen (which Walker thought the world needed to be warned about regarding the potential dangers from non-benevolent programmers), he included a routine inside ANIMAL called PERVADE. PERVADE’s purpose, as the name indicates, was to search through all of the user and system directories that the user held write privileges for (note, though, that Exec 8 was brilliantly designed from the outset with security in mind, and it was far ahead of its competitors in that regard, especially for those days), and copied it’s host program (ANIMAL in this case) to all directories that the user’s privilege levels allowed.
Most of the time, that only included the user’s own personal directory, but if a more privileged user ran ANIMAL, it would “infect” a great many system and user directories. So before long, ANIMAL would be in pretty much every single directory on the system! (Note that this is precisely what Walker wanted, and he took extreme caution to ensure that ANIMAL was completely benign in every other way.)
In those days, user groups served an essential purpose, including acting as a repository for all the various non-proprietary programs and utilities that various users had developed to share with others (the terms “freeware” and “open source” were years away from being coined). The programs were distributed via mag tapes, for obvious reasons (even the Arpanet was years away from becoming at all commonplace). As a consequence of PERVADE, ANIMAL was everywhere on those tapes, so the “infection” spread exponentially (well, as “exponentially” as the few multi-million dollar UNIVAC systems in existence permitted, anyway).
This solved Walker’s problem of being asked to send out all those copies of ANIMAL, but his cautionary tale of what self-replicating software would eventually inflict on the world did not come to many people’s attention until ANIMAL saturated an undue percentage of all the world’s hideously expensive UNIVAC storage space.
Fear ensued. That was the whole point.
I heard stories in those days about Walker creating a “time bomb” version of ANIMAL that would allegedly copy itself twice into the same directory and later delete itself, but those absurd fables are pure ANIMAL shit. What really happened is that UNIVAC’s system programmers modified the system data structures that PERVADE looked at in order to find writable directories, so that PERVADE stopped working.
The interesting fact is that UNIVAC did not do this in order to stop PERVADE at all! It was just another system software update that was designed for an entirely different purpose.
So: Lesson? Sadly, not all that well learned.
At least not until my software design über-hero Dave Cutler designed the OS and its nested security system called VAX/VMS for Digital Equipment Corp’s (DEC) 32-bit VAX computers. Cutler had previously been instrumental in the hugely successful RSX-11M 16-bit operating system for DEC’s PDP-11 series computers, with which his fame began.
With DEC’s premature demise (it was building personal computers running DEC’s highly reliable operating systems that cost even more than early Macintoshes, if you can imagine such a thing (my first acceptably powerful Mac, a IIcx model, cost me over $11,000(!!) with the necessary apps, a color monitor, and a printer), Cutler went on to design Microsoft’s only tolerable operating system in its history up to that point: Windows NT. Cutler, a socially “indiscreet” (read: extremely profane ass-kicker and problem solver) man and designer, whom it seems unlikely to have worked well with Bill (but what do I know?), is thus the prime mover behind Windows XP, too.
Why am I going on about Cutler? It’s because the nested security strategy and system he invented for VMS is virtually identical to that in Vista and Windows 7. But I can easily imagine Cutler working up a terrifying verbal fuck!storm about the ludicrous decision Microsoft made to enable his powerful multi-user account security strategy on a primarily single-user personal OS like Vista as the default! It would not have been pretty to be in earshot of that, I can promise you.
. . .
In closing, here’s a “fun fact”: If you were somehow to get your hands on a UNIVAC tape from those years, ANIMAL will still be there. In fact, many, many copies will still be there, waiting patiently to devour us again…
Here is a post-mortem on this mess, for the benefit of anyone who has been following it.
Well, I fixed the problem. Somehow, when I deleted the D: partition with Gparted, it screwed up the C: partition. It became encapsulated in an extended partition with some unallocated space in front of it. Why or how this happened is beyond me. It shouldn’t have happened. It was also given a name like /dev/sda5 :rolleyes:
I finallly fixed it by using Gparted to copy the partition to the unallocated space that was the D: drive, and copying the NTFS system back to the beginning of the drive out of the extended partition. After that, Windows booted with the message missing ntldr, and it was a simple matter to copy that file back into the C:\ from the XP install disk.
On rebooting, XP wanted to do a chkdsk, and it did it on the D: then the C: and after that it rebooted fine.
Kudos to Gparted, for doing everything that ambushed wanted me go buy Acronis for, the stinkeye to Dparted for somehow, and as far as I can tell, inexplicably, screwing up my partitions in a totally bizzare way, when all I did was nuke a D: drive.
Anyway, thanks to all for the help, and some interesting comments!
Thanks for posting the solution.
And congratulations, sir, that’s damned near the weirdest technical problem I’ve heard of in 10 years of doing nothing but computer support/admin for a living. I’m proud of you both for creating the problem and managing to solve it!
Yeah, it is the weirdest thing I have seen in working with Microsoft based computers since MS-DOS 3.2. It brings out the point that I have always used in troubleshooting, that everything has to be right for a computer to work. I call it the “From the power plug out” philosophy. It also calls into focus that the most important thing is to understand the underlying theory of why things work the way they do. I noticed that the partition had unallocated space in front of it a damn week ago, but didin’t realize the signifiicance of the fact. I knew that BIOS looks at the first sector/track etc., but somehow that didn’t register as a problem. Being tired, frustrated, asking people on boards for answers, is not the way to solve problems. Going back to basic knowledge is what pulled this one out of the fire. Trust your experience!