Yesterday, I noticed my Avast screen pop up and it had an “X” on update needed. I clicked this and let it run. After the update, it wanted to reboot but I just put my PC on standby. Today, I start working on my PC again but as the Avast message popped up wanting to reboot, I did.
After the reboot, all I get is a blank screen and a cursor blinking on the upper left after the BIOS finishes.
I have read in from various posts in the internet that Avast somehow missed a malware and their PC’s are dead too. Is mine related? My PC has been working fine right before this update. I have not installed anything for months. I am using XP SP3, with a paid version of Avast. Any ideas?
Thanks Doktor, although I’m not sure how that helps me other than pointing out 2 other people have experienced the same issues I have and seems like this is very recent.
I have an XP install disk which I almost ran fixmbr, but it said it would wipe out my partitions. I am not ready for that yet since I have important files I can’t loose at this time - at least before stupid US taxes. Any ideas to fix the mbr assuming it is corrupted? All my drives are SATA.
thanks. I already took out the drive since I was going to hook it up externally and scan it at my work PC tomorrow. I’ll make a backup while I’m at it as you suggested and fix the mbr. I also found some utility to backup my mbr although it’s probably useless if indeed it is bad. I’ll report back tomorrow
aargh fail. Took the wrong HD to work since I had a few in there and it’s been a while since I built my PC.
The good part is I might have used a single small drive with no partition for my C: So this might be a painless recovery.
At least the HD I took to work has all my important data and is clean. Life may not that bad afterall. I will post updates of what I do to get my PC back (by the weekend).
Just an update of this issue. I got my computer back up and running 2 weekends ago. I just got busy finishing taxes so I didn’t update.
However here’s what I did.
I took my suspected affected drive to my work PC and scanned it with our work installed Macafree. Surprisingly, it found 5 Trojans and a few adawares that it deleted. However, it found it on directories as old as 10 years old. The newest directories were in 2008. I had Avast forever and I’m surprised these have not been found even after bootup scans all through the years.
Anyway, after that, I cloned the drive onto a new one. Then I checked the MBR using MBR tool. Both drives seem to have good MBR’s.
So I plug in the cloned drive and start it up. Windows starts without any issues at all.
Instantly I notice that my Avast is updated to version 6.0 and I did a full scan.
This time Avast found 2 Trojans on the new cloned drive. And these are from very old directories as well. I’m confused as to what really happened here, but in any case I’m back and hope Avast version 6 will keep my system safe.
It could just be that the original drive is wearing out. Sometimes, but fortunately very rarely , your MBR can get messed up without any malware being involved at all.
