Frank's Blog

And I thought I could avoid Windows Vista by using mostly Mac OSX and – for special things – my old XP.
Far away from this!
Not having totally finished the Thinkpad T61 story a mostly unusable Vista was given to me by a friend asking for help.
So, without promising anything I took a look.
The Windows started normally but then it stuck, neither explorer opens, nor task manager. Just the installed Symantec Personal Security Scanner popped up and found 42 threats, here are some of them:

Sorrily the application didn’t want to cleanup the system, it was just a kind of evaluation, for full power… please insert coin.
:-/
I tried to access the files as shown in the scan, but wasn’t able to even find the folders where they should be. Seems, they hide themselves very well. Anyway, I had a special, bootable cd for cleanups like this, it’s called desinfec´t (a project from the german computer magazine “c´t”), Therein are three virusscanner free to use: Bitdefender, Kaspersky AntiVirus and Avira Antivir.
Good moment to give it a try.

Although there is a grafical desktop there is just the need to doubleclick the programm icon which starts a menubased script in a terminal. I used the wizard to scan relevant files and found them:

~ition/7.5/Quarantine/0D840000/4FC621EC.VBN INFECTED Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.ahwn
~STA/Users/user/Pictures/Setup_364s1.exe INFECTED Trojan.Win32.FraudPack.atdy
/media/sda1-VISTA/Users/user/Pictures/Setup_364s1.exe INFECTED

Reviewing the scanner logs I found an error with the Avira Antivir, it was not running. Doing a quick search in the magazines forum of the desinfec´t I found a solution (copying the avguard to the upper folder).
Next step was running the scan with placing the malware in a quarantine directory. You may ask “why not deleting directly ?”. Simple answer: I like to collect them to analyze them later.
Okay, the cleaning up ran through and after a reboot the Windows came up with “new features”. There were ducuments on the desktop ! The explorer came up, so the task manager did !
Ah, and also the Windows update wanted to install 17 updates, and later the service pack 2 and some more things.
Not to mention the new Java version or the installed Symantec endpoint protection.
I installed clamwin as free virusscanner and after a reboot I let it scan the whole disc, also the Symantec tool.
Both didn’t find any threats.
Cool.

Of course, there is always the risk that important windows system files are infected and windows cannot boot after the cleanup. This didn’t give me headaches for two reasons.
First, I did a backup of the user data before cleaning up (carefully with it, there were infected files within).
Second, there was a recovery partition of 30 GB to restore to factory defaults which didn’t seem to be infected (I ran scan on it also).
So after some hours of work (and let the laptop work) the system seems to be clean.
Oh, did I mention that I also install firefox and recommended it to the owner ?
Let’s see, if/when she comes back with new (or old ?) problems.

Here we are, continuing repairing the Thinkpad T61. For last status see prior post.
First I assured that my try to install a Windows Vista from a usb stick failed because of Windows – and so it was!

I connected an usb cdrom drive to the Thinkpad and was easily able to install from cd, well from the cds, there are 4.
:-/
Unfortunately I didn’t know the former version of Windows, an so the key from the sticker at the bottom doesn’t fit.
Anyway, Vista lets you install and use for a while, enough time to see if it works and to download and install a bunch of additional software from Lenovo support website (around 700MB, although I’m not sure if this was really all).

This all leads to the result, that the dvd drive was already broken and the only problem was the broken harddisc.
Now I “just” have to install a clean operating system with a valid license. Let’s see, if the owner has some documentation about what version was installed. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst idea to see the costs of a Windows 7 license.

But which one ? There are plenty. Doing some research the Home Premium version should do it. So I went to one of my favourite shop sites Alternate and found this price:

Okay I thought, but one moment, I was looking in the german website! I know there are strange differences of pricing between Spain and (at least) Germany, so I checked the spanish Alternate Website and… whoops !

It would be more economical order a copy in Germany. Before doing this I’ll have to check some other possibilities, but not now, tomorrow will be another day to go on.

To be continued…

Okay, as mentioned in this post I’m suspecting a broken harddisc or even more. Curious as I am I got a new harddisc (2.5 inch, SATA, 250GB, 56.- Euros) and replaced the old (broken?) one.
I also organized a Windows Vista install cd (the sticker on the bottom with the number was kindda readable). Prepared to install a fresh system I started from the cd drive – well, I tried to. The device just didn’t find anything to boot from. Hm, broken cd, I thought. To be sure I created a new virtual machine with Parallels and tried to install from the Vista cd – without any problem. Something wrong with SATA bus ?

Going on, I put the cd content on a usb memory stick to boot from it. This was done rather simple with this command on a Windows machine:

xcopy D:\*.* E: /s/e/f

Where “D” is the cd drive, “E” the mounted usb memory stick.
Selecting the stick as boot device (pressing “F12″ on the Thinkpad welcome screen gives a boot menu to choose from available devices) a Windows Vista installer came up, finally. I started the installation and ran into the next problem. The installer didn’t want to install on the harddisc because of:

Windows is unable to find a system volume that meets its criteria for installation

Googling around led me to Microsoft Support which wasn’t that useful. Within the installation system I was perfectly able to get access to the disc via command prompt (pressing SHIFT+F10 opens a “DOS box”) and do tasks with diskpart.
So, what do I do normally when I expect hardware errors ? I use a Linux distribution to see if the error persists. I connected my pimped Billix usb stick and started a network installation of Ubuntu Desktop 9.04 – without any problem!
And btw: It worked like a charm.

I placed the Vista install cd in the cd tray but Ubuntu neither mounted it automatically nor manually:

Unable to mount location, No media in the drive

Surely there is just a little trick I don’t know to install Vista without problems but as I’m used to use Macs and PCs with Linux I have to do it the hard way :-/ .
I restarted with the basics, pressing the “ThinkVantage” button on startup I went into the BIOS and set the SATA mode to “compatibility”. But installation failed again. I started the HDD diagnostic program of the BIOS which passed without errors.
Could the installation problem be caused by the usb stick ?
Is the dvd drive defect ?

That I’ll try to make clear next time

To be continued…