[SOLVED] virus or bad disk?

[luckydriver]

I have a perplexing problem. I noticed on Friday that my Norton icon was not in my tray and it was not running. I could not make it run unless I was in safe mode. It appeared to be okay in safe mode. I tried Norton tools to remove it and reinstall it and basically what I get is a computer that hangs all the time. Even after you reboot after it says it is removed you have to reboot it again and again and it's a pointless Circle. I tried an entire day of just rebooting and trying to reinstall it. Also I tried to boot into safe mode when Network support so I can reinstall it in safe mode but I could not figure out how to get internet while in safe mode. I tried doing a ScanDisk and it said it could not repair and recommended the other troubleshooting to repair windows but that did not work. The strange thing is that things like Firefox and chrome work perfectly but I cannot do something like open a PDF. I tried installing McAfee and it asked to uninstall Norton and I believe Norton did get uninstalled but then McAfee would not install all the way and it was over 30 minutes and nothing should take 30 minutes to install. I tried doing an online scan with another virus scanner and it did not work. Is it possible it's just a hard drive and putting an image on from a couple days ago would do the trick. I hate to start from scratch because of all the programs on the computer. also another symptom is when i go to restart it hang on restart forever ..so i just kill it manually and it restarts just find.

one other weird thing is when i try to go to safe mode sometimes. gives me BSOD and i have to reimage.

its an asus machine running 8.1 and new SSD drive about 3 to 4 years ago.

i was thinking of restoring an image from a few days ago on a spare HDD i have laying around. i guess that would tell me something.that rules in or out the SSD?

edit. reinstalled windows on the SSD. all programs still there, as well as norton not installing. but windows update says never run and it did take 90 min to install windows. so it had to have reinstalled. i guess..ugh

then i took an old HDD and imaged my drive from last week. still norton wont load. but my PDF finally opened.

i have no problem blowing out everything and formatting the SDD but when i try to run the ISO from USB it wont do it. isnt that the correct way to format and reinstall win 8?

 

[jojesa]

At this moment, you should perform a clean Windows installation.
Re-installing Windows over a possible corrupted files will yield unwanted results.

Save all your data since this method will wipe all content on your disk.
Remove any disks, if you happen to have more than one disk, and just leave the disk where Windows will be installed.

Create a new bootable Windows 8.1 installation on a USB flash drive (8GB or larger capacity).
Get the Windows 8.1 from Microsoft website and save it a computer.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows8ISO

Download the Windows Media Creation tool and run it to create the bootable Windows 8.1 USB installation.
Locate, and then select the Windows 8.1 ISO file. Then select Open.
Insert the USB device and select it when asked to do so to copy the Windows 8.1 setup files. onto, and then touch or click Begin copying.
When you see Bootable USB device created successfully, then you can use it to re-install Windows.
During setup, when you get to the Which type of installation do you want? window choose the Custom Install Windows only (advance) method.

Select and delete the Windows partitions on your disk.
When done, select the Unallocated Space and click the Next button to perform a clean installation.

Do not install any apps until Windows have finish updating. You might need to manually check for updates.

 

[luckydriver]

ok that what i was missing, thanks. how to make the usb bootable.

so other than printing out a belcarc advisor report. is there any other way to get a full list of stuff on my machine. of course ill print the control panel programs page as well and maybe screenshot the desktop so i can set it up again the way i like it. this wont be fun.

can you think of any instance where this wont solve my issue? id assume unless physical issue with the drive it would be ok. does the ISO inspect the drive before installing windows so i can avoid that issue.

 

[luckydriver]

i guess after 8 installs, now would be a great time to see if i can do the free win 10 upgrade to i guess. but if something goes wrong further down the line. will my win 8 product code work to download 10 again since its a win 8 key? i have 10 at work and see no real issues except i do hate forced windows updates.

 

[luckydriver]

i got home late but was dying to try this. took probably one hour from start to finish. my win 8 key didnt work on the setup screen for windows 10 so i said i had no key and was prepared to have unchanged wallpaper and watermark.

i decided to use an old hotmail address i set up 20 years ago and by some miracle, it said i have a digital license. i have no idea how i got it, but im 100% legit the shady ebay pricing seemed too good to be true and i didnt wanna go that route. now i dont have to.

norton was the 1st thing i installed of course. it worked fine out of the box. so i guess it was software and not a bad SSD. i used CCleaner to list my programs installed and took shots of control panel as well . i exported chrome and FF settings so hopefully that works for me. there are 1 or 2 things i forgot to take screenshots of but i think i can recreate them. this was definitely done in a hurry. making the machine back to its old state is gonna take a while but i'm sure ill enjoy the added speed.

now i have to adjust my backup settings to do more than a week. i had been doing full C drive images daily but maybe thats not the best strategy since i only saved the past 5 images and the problem wasnt noticed until after them

 

[jojesa]

Glad you system is back in a normal state.
If you had told me that you were planning to upgrade to Windows 10 on the first post, I would have advised you against entering the code during setup. Most of the times it fails.

When you are done installing all your programs and apps, consider creating an image backup of the system. In case of hardware failure (disk) you could deploy that image to a new disk.

 

[luckydriver]

the problem with my existing backups was that i didnt realized norton wasnt running until after 5 days of backups had passed and it was bad on all of them. i do full backups daily of the C drive but even the earliest one couldnt restore the system. i have to rethink that strategy of the backup plan.

i use acronis to a readynas with 2 4TB drives and about half of that is available for backups for the OS drive. since C is barely 120 gigs, i could either extend the number of full backups saved to 9 or 10 days or else do incremental or differential i guess.

any suggestions which is better.

thing is 2 of 5 of the backups i had said 'bad index' when i tried to restore them so now i'm paranoid about even backups. i dont know if was software issue or what with them.

 

[jojesa]

the problem with my existing backups was that i didnt realized norton wasnt running until after 5 days of backups had passed and it was bad on all of them. i do full backups daily of the C drive but even the earliest one couldnt restore the system. i have to rethink that strategy of the backup plan.

i use acronis to a readynas with 2 4TB drives and about half of that is available for backups for the OS drive. since C is barely 120 gigs, i could either extend the number of full backups saved to 9 or 10 days or else do incremental or differential i guess.

any suggestions which is better.

thing is 2 of 5 of the backups i had said 'bad index' when i tried to restore them so now i'm paranoid about even backups. i dont know if was software issue or what with them.

I don't think is a good idea to backup the whole C drive constantly. You might not even realized there is a problem with an app or setting when it it too late.
Backing up the whole C drive could save the issue into the backups as you already found out.

I would scheduled backups of files only, since the OS and apps do not change that often.
What I suggested will prevent that from happening.
You could use Acronis to create an image of the system when it is running as its best and also create a USB bootable media.
In case of a similar issue or if your disk fails, you could use Acronis bootable media to restore your system from the image.
Also use Acronis to restore your files from the incremental backups.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

On the upgrade. They said a few years back that they ended the free upgrades. But the last couple of systems I've tried to update from Windows 7 or 8 in the past couple of months still work. I don't know for how long this will be the case. But they seem happy to let people slip onto the new os so they can finish off Windows 7-8 more quickly.