Oh, balls.
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. I managed to end up with a virus/malware/trojan/worm on Beastbits, after a stupid, yet costly momentary lapse of concentration. After downloading some “perfectly legitimate” RAR files, I go to open one of them…
I double-click, without even looking at the file extension. Turned out that this multi-part RAR file had its first part as an executable. Bohh. You know that feeling when your heart sinks into your chest, and you know that it really is, all over? That was the feeling I got. It was the first time I had the feeling, and it was ultimately justified. Within seconds, I began to get cryptic error messages to do with programs such as Spotify, which wasn’t even running at the time. All I could do was hope and pray that this was a fluke.
Of course, it wasn’t. Beastbits was done for. My “wise” decision of not installing anything security-wise collapsed around my head, as a search on google for the error message redirected me through a series of “spam” search engines. It was all over.
I didn’t bother even looking into fixing it. I considered a reformat. This, as proved in earlier episodes of the blog simply wasn’t practical. Even less practical was the thought of restoring from one of my ancient backups.
So, I bit the bullet, and wiped the entire drive. Not just the 50Gb Windows partition, but the 180Gb “shite waiting to be put onto DVD” parition.Thankfully, and amazingly, I’d already written everything that was on there to DVD, so there was only roughly 2Gb of stuff which I lost, none of it important.
Therefore, I am once again back using Linux. I will probably continue to use afore-mentioned operating system until I manage to get a good enough image of my C drive back up and running, or I scrap Beastbits altogether, and get a whole new machine…
June 20th, 2009 at 11:38:23 pm
That sucks. I had the same thing happened last week. Chinese computer, so I clicked yes at some point without fully understanding and wham….malware. Luckily have everything backed up.
But isn’t it good to delete all that crap and have drives with gbs of space? I feel like I have a new pc!
June 21st, 2009 at 9:18:35 am
You’ll be surprised at how many people don’t back up, and it’s not often I do this, but I salute you for taking the time to back up your data!
Thanks to a coincidental trial run of an off-site backup utility, it means I can only think of one thing, and one thing alone that I’ve lost, and that one thing isn’t worth mentioning.
And yes, it feels good to delete stuff, unfortunately, in the meantime I’ve had to install Linux, so although my main hard drive is almost empty (6Gb out of 227Gb), it still feels like I’m wading through treacle wearing tennis bats on my feet!
June 21st, 2009 at 12:00:06 pm
I’ve always said a format is good for the soul.
I myself have fix two family computers, reinstalled XP on my desktop and rebuilt the family laptop twice in the last two weeks. So I’ll be quiet happy if I don’t do any for a long while.