Computer crashed - help!!

[Wynand N]

Last night the devil played tricks with my old trusted computer. A little screen poped up and refused to be cancelled. Said something to the effect that the page requested is not available offline.
Whenever I am on the net it automatically start downloading and by clicking on the icon on taskbar was a waste of time. Totally ignored any actions.

The little icon looked suspisiously like some windows update thing and when I went to windows update and disable any automatic updates, the icon disapeared but the downloading continious, stopped after about 30mb download for a few minutes and starts again. Last night it downloaded over 140mb of unknown data or **** to my computer.

Well, this morning I tried to restore my computer to an earlier date and holy J, a total shut down.
My hard disk was formatted and windows reloaded. On start up the same ****. I now have my firewall Sygate and Bitdefender holding it back, but as soon a I try to download, this intruder stops the download, take over and I can't stop it. Makes all the buttons on my taskbar dead. All that helps is to shut the machine down and restart.
The damn computerguy loaded their windows XP pro instead of mine and I cannot get into windows update (suspect intruder) to disable auto updates.

What can I do. Can anyone help?? Needless to say I lost all my work and data on my machine. I hate windows - real crap. To top it, with this problem I cannot get FireFox downloaded as the intruder takes over on the download.
My disc is clean after the format, and no surfing except to AVG & Morzilla.org sites were made.

[Raggi_Thor]

Search for UNDELETE or simmilar.
Norton may have some tools that let you browse deleted files. As you knwo, files are not physically deleted before they are overwritten with new data, they are just deleted from the disk "table of content" so to speak.

[GeoffSChapman]

I gave up with windows recently after all sorts of battles with virus, pop-ups, crap of all sorts, I am a new convert to LINUX

Geoff
Uniquest Marine

[D'ARTOIS]

I will follow soonest......

[Robert Gainer]

You need to run the program “fdisk” before you start the new instillation of windows. This can remove all of the partitions on the hard drive and then when you run the setup program for windows it will format the drive, everything, including the nasty piece of code will be gone. Depending on the version of windows, fidisk is somewhere on the setup disk.
Robert Gainer

[Raggi_Thor]

Linux?
I need to run Rhino, will it come a version for Linux?
IntelliCAD can run on Linux with some kind of "virtual pc", but is it worth it?
There are some general cad programs for linux, using dxf as file format.
What about more (yacht) design oriented programs?
This is maybe not the right thread, but...

[Bergalia]

Wynand - do yourself a favour - switch to Mac...(no I'm not a salesman)

[MikeJohns]

Originally Posted by Wynand N

Last night the devil played tricks with my old trusted computer.

Sorry to hear it Wynand

I was driven off XP
I switched to Win2000 after too many problems with XP and have had no problems since.

One of my sons is an IT wizard so if you have any specific queries email me and i'll pass them on.

[Danielsan]

"Search for UNDELETE or simmilar.
Norton may have some tools that let you browse deleted files. As you knwo, files are not physically deleted before they are overwritten with new data, they are just deleted from the disk "table of content" so to speak."

Raggi Thor is right don't do the format or fdisk but try to use some data recovery tool, I had one but don't know the name, but I am sure there are some on the net. you will need an other access point to the net to get it to you. let us now if you found or not...

[Jeff]

Note the date of the original post in this thread was 03-05-2005 ...

[Danielsan]

Yep!!!

Think his problem is solved....

LOL