Rebuilding the ‘puter
Posted by Kirk M on 21 Nov 2007 | Tagged as: Life at home
Well, after that massive "virus bomb" hit my poor PC, I’ve spent the last two days rebuilding the OS from scratch. And thanks to the XP PRO install disk I was able to replace just the OS initially, albeit a much older version, and get the ‘puter up long enough to salvage most of my files.
I was lucky enough to find all of My Documents folder files intact which considering it contains a serious portion of my life, I was very relieved to be able to salvage them. All my blogging stuff seems to be intact also as well as my Firefox Profile folder (I create a profile that’s separate from the default install just in case of a situation such as this) so all my extensions and settings are still there. Okay so far.
Then came the mail…
I also use a separate profile for Thunderbird but due to an older version of XP PRO on my wife’s computer that for some reason does not like my 1GB thumb drive, it failed while copying the backed up profile folder and successfully mangled all my mail and settings. At that point I remembered every curse my father and the Navy ever taught me plus a few more I made up on the spot. 235MB’s of mail gone!?!
But being the "never say die" idiot that I am, I turned to the full backup I had Live OneCare V2 perform when I first managed to get the computer up after the OS had been replaced. To make a long story short, after the restore, there on my desktop was another "TB Profiles" folder. Not quite all there but more than enough to slowly rebuild another profile folder and boy did I have a lot of fun doing that!
After a day of trying different combinations of mail, chrome (CSS) and data files and folders shuffled this way and that, I finally had a working email program with all my mail and accounts intact…I hope. At least that’s the way it appears so far.
So after a deleting the partition on the hard drive, creating a new one, doing an old fashioned full NTSF format thereof (took nearly 2 hours) and reloading XP PRO from SP1 on up…
And downloading and installing 150+ updates afterwards…
I had a working computer again.
A few full virus scans that came up clean and shiny and my faithful electronic companion is slowly coming up to full steam.
I think I’ll just keep the setup fairly minimal this time around. I was planning on reloading the whole thing sometime during the winter but this wasn’t exactly the way I planned it. 
A note on Windows Live OneCare V2: I’m not really going to blame OneCare for failing to stop this rather massive attack. The fault is mostly mine for not setting the Internet security suite to automatically throw any viral/spyware/adware type suspects into quarantine instead of asking me what to do when the program finds a nasty or three.
The way these "virus bombs" tend to work is that they sit dormant somewhere deep in your system, sometimes even in the master boot record for up to a year sometimes. Then, either by a countdown or number of reboots/startups, whatever, the "bomb" is launched throwing several dozen of these small nasty buggers throughout your system. These are some of the most difficult virus’s for any anti-virus/anti-spyware software to find or stop once it’s launched. I’ve helped recover several computers that were loaded with so called "top of the line" Internet Security suites that were brought down by this very same type of attack. If I had initially set OneCare to work automatically without having to ask me what to do, it might have been able to save the day. As it was it clobbered a bunch of the little ##$$@@!!’s before the system was overwhelmed. I just couldn’t hit the "kill" button fast enough.
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