For a Friend

[RedFury]

Having a helluva time figuring out what's going on with his system. Has reformatted the drive, reinstalled Win98se. Done this a few times. It'll run for a while, then he says the registry starts pointing to other programs. Then he starts losing Dll files. It's a mess. I told him it was a virus, so I gave him a 3 gig HDD to redo the system with. Fresh boot disk, cleared memory ( obviously, had to disconnect power to put the 3 gig in ) and had the same problem apparently. I haven't actually had a chance to get hands on the system myself. Does this throw any flags up to anyone? My feeling is 99% virus, he thinks it's a hardware problem, which is always a possibility. Bad IDE cable? I dunno. We've/ he's been scratching heads for a good week now.

I'll try to get more info if you ask about it specifically. I'm trying to get him to write down any BSOD messages to help figure this out.

[Martoch]

So on a totally new, clean install of Win 98se on a formatted hard drive...after installing D2...D2 files start disappearing???


That's the ONLY drive connected to his system? (3gig u gave him)

[RedFury]

As far as I know, Yup. Details are kinda sketchy really. Him and I have a tendancy to start getting into verbal troubleshooting whirlwinds ( which really gets the guys at the shop looking at us weird )

I figure if I can get a few questions from you guys, I can sit him down with me here and answer everything/add more info and get this figured out.

Why? cuz you guys rock!

[Martoch]

I'm assuming that this is a legit D2? No weird hacks/cracks added? SOJ dupers? Etc, etc...

[RedFury]

Um, you lost me there Martoch. Not sure what you mean by Legit D2? Nothing weird as far as I can tell. ( We share software often, including this OS-monetary reasons, and I don't have any problems on my end. His system has been running without much of a hitch until the last month or so when this happened. I need to get more background details. How it started, what changed, blah, blah, blah.

Here's the kicker, he's got 4 kids and his wife using this computer also. So, who KNOWS what has gone on in that thing! Kazaa, ICQ, downloads happen almost everytime that thing has power surging through its copper veins.

[NeoStarO1]

What kind of hard drive is it? Has he tried to write to zeros before formating? Might be a problem with the hard drive sectors, one showing up bad or something. hard to say. Has he had the problem before in the past with this?

[Jeordiewhite]

Martoch must have read dll as d2 descent 2 or whatever..., when redfury was talking about .dll files.
Maybe he should scan that hard drive or check into a new cable or a new hard drive.

[Centurion]

edit

[Jeordiewhite]

That may work, but sounds to me that he is using 98 because it's a slow machine.

[RedFury]

Nope, definetely not a slow machine ( by todays standards, it's a little slow...1.2 ghz Duron )

We both run 98SE because we don't want to pay for XP, and both don't really like it from our limited experience.

However, on another note...UPDATE!

Aparently the computer is up and running strong again after another reformat and clean install. Aparently he was running the Bios antivirus program and when windows tried to write to the boot sector, he was telling the antivirus to not let it write to the boot sector when the antivirus program flipped up the warning screen. I have no idea why he would do this in the first place, or how the system even ran, but I asked him if the BIOS antivirus was disabled when he installed windows the last time, and it was like flipping a switch. ( he had just enabled it a month prior to the original crash 'cuz he forgot to when he originally set up the computer )