Hi,
Last week I downloaded and installed the Avast Home edition on my Win98SE system. After I installed the application the first thing I did was to run the VRDB manually. Yesterday I believe a virus infected my system and damaged one or more Windows DLL files. The result is that Windows will freeze with the “Blue” screen and a message about the “VFAT” cannot be found or is corrupt. I have tried doing a system restore however when Windows loads I still receive the same error, I then tried reinstalling the OS and still receive this message.
Is there any way to run the Avast VRDB repair tool from MSDOS or as soon as windows attempts to load? I can access all directories and all DOS functions on the C: drive after I boot from my emergency start disk.
Any advice or help will be greatly appreciated.
What was the virus name, what was the filename, where was it found
example (C:\windows\system32\infected-filename.xxx)?
When the virus was detected what actions did you take? - Repair (if offered as an option), move to chest, delete, etc.
You need to understand a little more about how the VRDB works, see the avast help file, healing, VRDB. First you can activate it (run it manually), it is called in conjunction with the avast detection of a virus. If avast finds a virus in one of the files that it has scanned by the VRDB routine then you will be offered the option to Repair when the virus is detected. If you choose the repair option then the VRBD would be used to try and repair the infected file.
I had clicked on the Windows Explorer Icon on the desktop; instead of Win explorer loading a MSDOS window appeared and started to delete from the C:\WINDOWS\ directory. AVAST was running but for some reason did not detect this as a virus, when the msdos window popped up I immediately pressed CTL-C in the window and stopped the delete actions. However there has obviously been some damage and windows immediately froze.
During my attempts to restore the system I found a batch file called drun.bat with 2 commands: deltree /y c:\windows*.* and deltree /y c:\progra~1*.*
When I terminated the batch running under msdos it was just starting to delete from the c:\windows directory.
When I examined the hard drive from the rescue disk nothing was deleted from the \program files\ directory. What I am not sure about is what was deleted, I think one or more DLL’s from the \system or \system32 sub-directories were removed or corrupted when I terminated the batch file.
I was hoping that there was some way to manually extract the files saved in the VRDB. If not I will have to re-format the hard drive and re-install the OS thus losing a massive amount of data. The applications can be re-installed but the data will be gone forever.
Thank you for your very prompt reply.
I had clicked on the Windows Explorer Icon on the desktop; instead of Win explorer loading a MSDOS window appeared and started to delete from the C:\WINDOWS\ directory. AVAST was running but for some reason did not detect this as a virus,
Unfortunately this is a batch file not a virus and unless the process that put it there was recognised as a virus the batch file I believe would not be detected as a virus. You or someone/thing/process downloaded a file called drun.bat to the desktop and you activated it. The contents of the drun.bat (a text file) could be legitimate for a batch file.
I can’t remember if there is a system file checker in win98 (its been a long time) but there is a way of checking system integrity. I would try that first, then the re-install if no joy, you will need to visit windows update afterwards to ensure any files replaced/restored by the reinstall are the latest.