Y
Yellowlego
Apologies if this is in the wrong forum. If it is just let me know and I’ll shuffle it to wherever it needs to be.
Admittedly I am not super tech savvy so I hope there is just some fix I’ve over looked. There are a lot of issues I have had crop up over the last few days. So a couple days ago my CD drive started randomly opening and closing at least once every 5 minutes or so. I’m not sure if it was closing just after a certain amount of time or if it was receiving a command to close. Reading about the issue, I found that dust in the drive can sometimes cause the issue. So, I opened up my computer tower and vacuumed out some of the dust very carefully. I unplugged the CD drive in order to properly remove dust from all possible angles. I plugged the drive back in, started up my computer and saw that the problem had not gone away. Going to the next possibility I thought it might be a virus. I unplugged my CD drive in the meantime just to stop it from opening and closing while I worked. When I attempted to turn my computer on again, I ran into my second issue. Booting up would result in the common issue of starting up with only a black screen with the cursor displayed. I managed to get it to boot up regularly by hitting F8 and telling it to start from the last known good configuration. I simply thought that perhaps my unplugging the CD drive had caused this issue.
So I start it up regularly again and then run a malware search using Malware Bytes. While this was going on, I downloaded a program for my online college course. I really don’t think this program caused any issues. It is from an educational site and was recommended by my university in order to run population simulations. I would be surprised if it had malware rolled into it. So I download this program and it refuses to start. Around this time my malware scan completes and has found no significant threats. I tell it to clear the tracking cookies it found and it prompts me to restart my computer to complete their deletion. Thinking nothing of it I allow it to restart.
This is where everything really hit the fan. So when I attempt to boot it up again, again it is giving me the black screen with only a cursor. Thinking perhaps this is the same issue I had previously; I attempt to restart using the last known good configuration. It fails. I attempt to use a system restore point and it fails. Startup repair also results in failure. I ran chkdsk repair and that seems to turn up nothing. It even refused to boot up into safe mode. I go to sleep for the night and then try a system restore from an earlier point in the morning. This seems to go through. Excited, I restart my computer to see it at the black screen again. I attempt to start it up in safe mode, and luckily it can at least manage this now. I’ve tried running my anti-virus program (bit defender) but it doesn’t appear to want to run without updates. I attempted to plug my CD drive back in to see if some miscommunication between it and the computer was causing this issue but it didn’t solve anything. In fact, it still opens and closes on its own. I also went through and updated all of my drivers to no avail. And that’s basically where I am now. I’m not really sure what else to do. Did I just manage to get the mother of all malware? Did I screw something up while vacuuming the inside of my computer? My friend did tell me that you’re supposed to use compressed air because of static electricity. Did unplugging the CD drive cause some sort of massive mix up?
I am at work right now and will amend this post with information when I get home. My computer runs Windows 7. I wrote down a few of the repair error codes, though they were different codes each time. Additionally, when I started it in safe mode after a failure to start up from a restore point, it told me the reason it failed was that it couldn’t retrieve a certain file. This file was in one of my Steam video game folders, so I just deleted the whole game folder in case there was just some weird file corrupted or hiding malware in it. This also had no effect.
Continue reading...
Admittedly I am not super tech savvy so I hope there is just some fix I’ve over looked. There are a lot of issues I have had crop up over the last few days. So a couple days ago my CD drive started randomly opening and closing at least once every 5 minutes or so. I’m not sure if it was closing just after a certain amount of time or if it was receiving a command to close. Reading about the issue, I found that dust in the drive can sometimes cause the issue. So, I opened up my computer tower and vacuumed out some of the dust very carefully. I unplugged the CD drive in order to properly remove dust from all possible angles. I plugged the drive back in, started up my computer and saw that the problem had not gone away. Going to the next possibility I thought it might be a virus. I unplugged my CD drive in the meantime just to stop it from opening and closing while I worked. When I attempted to turn my computer on again, I ran into my second issue. Booting up would result in the common issue of starting up with only a black screen with the cursor displayed. I managed to get it to boot up regularly by hitting F8 and telling it to start from the last known good configuration. I simply thought that perhaps my unplugging the CD drive had caused this issue.
So I start it up regularly again and then run a malware search using Malware Bytes. While this was going on, I downloaded a program for my online college course. I really don’t think this program caused any issues. It is from an educational site and was recommended by my university in order to run population simulations. I would be surprised if it had malware rolled into it. So I download this program and it refuses to start. Around this time my malware scan completes and has found no significant threats. I tell it to clear the tracking cookies it found and it prompts me to restart my computer to complete their deletion. Thinking nothing of it I allow it to restart.
This is where everything really hit the fan. So when I attempt to boot it up again, again it is giving me the black screen with only a cursor. Thinking perhaps this is the same issue I had previously; I attempt to restart using the last known good configuration. It fails. I attempt to use a system restore point and it fails. Startup repair also results in failure. I ran chkdsk repair and that seems to turn up nothing. It even refused to boot up into safe mode. I go to sleep for the night and then try a system restore from an earlier point in the morning. This seems to go through. Excited, I restart my computer to see it at the black screen again. I attempt to start it up in safe mode, and luckily it can at least manage this now. I’ve tried running my anti-virus program (bit defender) but it doesn’t appear to want to run without updates. I attempted to plug my CD drive back in to see if some miscommunication between it and the computer was causing this issue but it didn’t solve anything. In fact, it still opens and closes on its own. I also went through and updated all of my drivers to no avail. And that’s basically where I am now. I’m not really sure what else to do. Did I just manage to get the mother of all malware? Did I screw something up while vacuuming the inside of my computer? My friend did tell me that you’re supposed to use compressed air because of static electricity. Did unplugging the CD drive cause some sort of massive mix up?
I am at work right now and will amend this post with information when I get home. My computer runs Windows 7. I wrote down a few of the repair error codes, though they were different codes each time. Additionally, when I started it in safe mode after a failure to start up from a restore point, it told me the reason it failed was that it couldn’t retrieve a certain file. This file was in one of my Steam video game folders, so I just deleted the whole game folder in case there was just some weird file corrupted or hiding malware in it. This also had no effect.
Continue reading...