Hi - I have a Dell XPS 600 – running XP Professional up to date with ms updates, service packs, etc. Everything, including safe mode has been taken over or at least appears to have been taken over. I cannot get to the internet, can't run any virus scans - it has taken over or disabled everything - at least in the view it is presenting. XP Antivirus 2010 malware rapidly moved from fake pop-ups telling me that I had serious security threats and needed to buy their software immediately to a really nasty, deep down infection. (I didn’t try to buy their software).
From what I've read of the virus, and what my experience confirms, it runs in parallel with other programs that you execute and disables the ones that it finds to be threats (I may have read that in this forum…). So every time I’ve run a program to fix this thing (antivirus, regedit, msconfig to name a few) it disables those and the problem gets worse the more I try - I kept losing capability to use the computer resources with each login. It even displays a fake task manager now.
I have begun to see lots of posts that are similar to mine. It is vicous if you don't catch it at the beginning. I believe it's the same thing as "bsmadi" has in another post on this forum.
• I originally tried the Malwarebytes program when I could still load from a flash drive, but made one critical mistake in closing it before I let it reboot to finish the clean up and give me a window to do more de-tox of the pc. I seem to have blown my one opportunity to catch this thing early enough by doing that.
• F8, F12, F2 cannot get around the shell it’s put up. Something happens right after the Dell screen appears showing the choices (F8, run in safe mode, for example) - the malware takes over as soon as I hit enter on any of the options
• I can’t access the jump drive or the internet to install removal software. The port for the flash drive does not appear in the taskbar (nothing does except a fake start button), the flash drive does not light, does not show up in 'my computer' (which is also a fake).
• I can't reboot from my original XP installation disk. It stops at the welcome screen of the XP Pro Setup screen and freezes - will not let me type in an 'r' or exit, etc.. (I did read somewhere that I need at least SP 2 on the installation disk because I have SATA, not IDE - my original disk only has SP1. I will see if Dell can send me a new disk)
I feel as though the malware has created a whole sandbox for itself on another partition of my harddisk and that's what I'm seeing. Any exe that I try to execute brings up the 'what program do you want to use to open it' pop-up.
Now:
-- When I hit F8 to try and go into safe mode, the pc scrolls through a page full of lines: multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\windows\system32\drivers..... the bug has already taken hold at that point and then it just stops.
-- If I let it go into regular startup, a pretend chkdsk takes over the whole screen, then finally shows me my "desktop." The Start bar looks odd and does not show any of the devices (no indication that the network is not connected, no indication that the jump drive is available, etc.) The screen is completely filled with a copy of my desktop, none of the programs work. The flash drive does not light up or flash.
Full disclosure – I posted this on another website's forum and did not get much help as the solutions kept involving a jump drive to transfer files.
I would appreciate any help you can provide.