Bug in antivirus software hits LANs at JR East, some media

The Japan Times ^ | 4/24/05 | The Japan Times

[Vinnie]

It got me.
I was almost at the point of creating a thread looking for tech help. Thought I was going to have to format and start over.
I tried everything I knew to do, safe mode, sys restore, defrag, chkdsk, etc.
Funny thing is that I had gotten an auto update from Java Fri. evening and was attempting to download it. I kept seeing 0% complete and exited the download.

I thought that by interrupting that download the comp was trying to download every time I started it. I couldn't even shut down, had to unplug the box.

Finally Sun.AM I started the box off the startup CD and uninstalled Java 1.4. ( I had 1.5 on the machine) and everything seemed to be back to normal.

I guess my actions were coincidental to what really had me down.

[browardchad]

Your hard drive shouldn't be dead. There's a fairly easy fix to this one

An update: I was able to reclaim the disk with this fix, but with some strange results. It's a small (20GB) NTFS disk with no previous problems and not much on it besides XP, but a third of it disappeared in the process (XP and Diskeeper reported 13GB capacity, with most of that used, but no errors.) After uninstalling a few programs that were also trashed, uninstalling TM, cleaning up the registry, defragging and everything else I could think of, I was able to clone it to a new 40GB disk, at which point XP rebooted, ran chkdsk and fixed the errors on the new disk.

All's well that ends well, but once bitten twice shy -- no more Trend Micro.

I guess I could have made the damage worse by trying to fix the disk before I realized the problem was the virus definition file (the computer's used by a family member who knows zip about computers, and I wasn't told about it immediately, so I didn't have much of a clue), but the last thing I'd suspect is a bad file from a trusted source. Not anymore.

Thanks again for your help.