{"id":3467,"date":"2012-03-26T11:01:41","date_gmt":"2012-03-26T01:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=3467"},"modified":"2012-03-26T11:06:30","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T01:06:30","slug":"computer-fun-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=3467","title":{"rendered":"Computer fun, or not"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, middle of the day Friday I attempt to open a PDF attachment emailed to me (from a trusted source), and Windows XP tells me it won&#8217;t open.<\/p>\n<p>And that marked the start of things.<\/p>\n<p>Some other programs started falling over, so I did a restart. And here&#8217;s what I found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>many of my program shortcuts had their &#8216;Target&#8217; fields zapped, so they wouldn&#8217;t link to programs<\/li>\n<li>many of the programs which still had their links would not start because they were not recognised as valid WIN32 programs<\/li>\n<li>of the ten or so websites I attempted access in Chrome, my own site and IMDB were the only ones that worked<\/li>\n<li>when I tried backing up folders to an external USB hard drive, where any file had an extension of .exe, .dll, .ini or .bat, it would create a file of the same name at the destination with a size of 0 bytes, and then the dialogue would ask if I wanted to overwrite it. If I said &#8216;No&#8217;, then the copy would proceed, with the next file. If I said &#8216;Yes&#8217;, then the copy would terminate.<\/li>\n<li>when I did a reboot I had a brief window of opportunity in which I could start up some of those &#8216;Not WIN32&#8217; programs. Tens of seconds, not minutes, was the size of the window. After a minute or so the window closed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Looked like a virus to me. Perhaps Zone Alarm could have detected it, but it had ironically launched a virus scan and then had a number of its own DLLs marked as not valid, and so was stuck in its scan without any way of getting its control dialog up.<\/p>\n<p>I finished the copying in a command prompt window in Safe Mode. It took me a half hour to re-familiarise myself with the quirks of the XCOPY command, but I was able to complete the copying, including all those otherwise troublesome files. XCOPY is amazingly powerful once you know what it can do.<\/p>\n<p>I couldn&#8217;t find my motherboard or graphics card install discs, but I was able to find out what they are (reboot, check My Computer Properties and Display Properties quickly before they became disabled again) and downloaded their drivers on another computer.<\/p>\n<p>Then a low level reformat of C: as part of the Windows XP reinstall. Unfortunately my version was SP 2. So the full install also involved at least 70 Windows updates.<\/p>\n<p>Then it was a matter of reinstalling everything bit by bit. Still can&#8217;t get the Blu-ray drive to recognise the file system of Blu-ray discs. Maybe I&#8217;ll be able to fix that one too.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update (a few minutes later):<\/strong> It came back to me. Of course, Windows XP doesn&#8217;t support Blu-ray. LG the drive maker included assorted applications to do stuff with the drive, but not the &#8216;UDF Reader&#8217; driver, which is what is required to allow the disc contents to be read as though it were a normal drive. I&#8217;d quite forgotten about that for a while.<\/p>\n<p>I found the driver on my backups (it&#8217;s actually a Toshiba one, made for HD DVD, but it does the job), clicked on the .inf file, and voil\u00e0, now I have the Blu-ray drive working properly again!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, middle of the day Friday I attempt to open a PDF attachment emailed to me (from a trusted source), and Windows XP tells me it won&#8217;t open. And that marked the start of things. Some other programs started falling &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/?p=3467\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3467"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3471,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467\/revisions\/3471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hifi-writer.com\/wpblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}