question

[caldin]

have any of you guys heard of xp antivirus 08? it got installed on my computer somehow, and i can't get it to uninstall. its coming up with popups from my task bar like every other minute, saying i have 3007 viruses on my comp. but i already have another antivirus on my computer, and it isn't saying i have any viruses. is this xp antivirus something bad in and of itself? how do i get rid of it?

[bobletman]

That my friend is a bad ass virus you have there. Ok install avast antivirus and see what it can do. Make sure to run it in safe mode and to delete the virus's found in safe mode as well. And whatever you do if xp antivirus is telling u to install something or give them money DO NOT DO IT, ITS A SCAM.

[caldin]

i have Iolo antivirus. will that do the trick? and i had forgotten how to get into safemode with xp.

[bobletman]

It might but I doubt it will. Install avast its the best you can get and its so light weigt. Umm in order to get into safe mode you have to restart ur comp and then I believe its F9,or F8 or delete. Im not sure i ususally just run my hand across all the F- keys because I can never seem to remember.

[caldin]

alright, installing avast and rebooting hopefully to safemode. will let ya'll know if i get it taken care of

[bobletman]

If that doesnt work. Then I recommend going to this site www.geekstogo.com This site is all about helping with virus,trojans and so on. They will definately be able to help you get rid of whatever you have.

[tyle6]

What you have my friend is a bad ass root kit! i had it the other week actually! it will remove functions from the ctr+alt+del menu even in vista !! like the task manager feature!
I have avast 4.8 pro and it couldn't even handle this ******* and it has built in anti root kit features!
I found the only way to fully repair windows was with a full format and uninstall actually. as all teh restore points were gone and there were alot of things being hacked to **** inside the OS.

Save your data that you can, back it up and wipe that drive!! scan the **** out anything you have backed up off that machine before you toss it back on anything.

I am dubbing this stupid thing the ROOT-KIT OF DEATH.

[Methious]

I spent 4 hours on a buisness machine yesterday fighting that antivirus 2008 from hell.

It disables almost every thing you need to get at it and reduces you back to using DOS command prompts to try and eridicate it.

After following the instructions on Geekstogo.com and manually removing the files the machine went into an endless reboot cycle and I ended up reformatting and reloading the machine.

I tried Avast, AVG, Norton, McAfee, OS repair from disk and they all failed.

On the OS repair it went all the way through and let me get to the enter the liscence key screen and wouldn't take the key.

[caldin]

just bloody great. just what i wanted to spend my time after i get off work doing, reformatting my system drive. my second drive should be ok though, right? that has data that would take hours to back up.

[raidersforever01]

I have fixed computers with this i see that xp anti virus all the time. I am not sure if nod32 still does trials or not, but if you can get it update it. Spybot search and destroy is free update that. Also download smitfraudfix leave it on the desktop for now then disable system restore for all the drives. Go into safe mode go to run dialog box and type in msconfig find out were antivirus 2008 is installed using startup tab. Manually delete everything that has to do with it. Run nod32 and spybot, then run smitfraudfix. You should be clean after that. After your sure its clean you and reenable system restore. You can't update nod32 in safemode so makesure it is updated first.

[Sadasius]

Accept the loss and save what you can and just format and clean install of XP. Trying to fix this one is more then a pain in the a$$ even for a pro.

[Miker]

Get what you can off the PC and burn the harddrive in a fire that is at least 1500f (Or, just format the drive) and re-install windows.

[caldin]

got a problem. i have an 80 gig IDE hard drive as my system drive, and a 500 gig SATA drive as my storage drive. when i go in to reformat the partition of my system drive, its saying my C drive is my 500 gig hard drive, and my D drive is the 80 gig hard drive. wtf? windows explorer doesn't see it that way. im afraid to reformat what the windows disc is showing as C, as i don't want to lose my data.

[caldin]

and it looks like it won't let anything install on my computer now, either. so i have to reformat, but its showing my hard drives all backwards for the reformat. im so confused, and im not willing to lose all my data on my bigger storage drive. it'd take too long to get it all back

[Miker]

BIOS reads drives different then Windows.

Lets say a dual boot of Vista and XP, XP is on a 80GB, Vista on a 1TB.

In BIOS C: 80GB D:1TB
In XP C: 80GB D:1TB
In Vista C:1TB D: 80GB

The program that reads the harddrives makes up the name based on boot priority. So to a OS C: is always the drive the OS it on.

[caldin]

except its not bios that im talking about. its when i boot off the windows xp cd to reformat. it says my 80gig hard drive, which is my system drive, is D, and my 500gig hard drive, which is my storage drive, as C. my 500gig hard drive has no OS on it, while my 80g hard drive has only one copy of windows xp on it. so why is it showing the drive without an OS on it as the C drive?

[raidersforever01]

Remove the 500gb then the 80gb should show up as c: and after installing windows you can put it back in.

[caldin]

alright, im reinstalling everything, my 500 gig hard drive is being seen as drive E now, and my dvd drive as drive D. but that shouldn't matter, as my 80gig system drive is being seen as C, right?

[werty316]

alright, im reinstalling everything, my 500 gig hard drive is being seen as drive E now, and my dvd drive as drive D. but that shouldn't matter, as my 80gig system drive is being seen as C, right?
No, it doesn't matter.

[caldin]

oh thank god, im glad i can finally get my machine up and running again

thanks for all the info guys, really appreciated, even though i had to resort to a reformat.

[werty316]

Thats good to hear, now don't get that virus again :naughty:

[Sadasius]

You have to watch your surfing habits. If your installing all kinds of free things in advertisements, especially the one's promising to fix your computer then you will hit this problem over and over again.

[caldin]

nah, i despise ads about fixing my comp. if it needed fixing, it wouldn't work, i don't touch that crap. and im usually only browsing forums. not too often do i stray otherwise. but im still trying to figure out how i got this stupid thing.

[Miker]

As I know, you only get this by going to a site, and downloading there "anti" virus.

[caldin]

nah, i had an antivirus already installed. wasn't interested in another one. i know i didn't download something claiming to be one. this time around, i went straight for avast antivirus, instead of installing Iolo.

[huynhc]

just use avast as its free and pretty decent. outside of kaspersky 6.0 and NOD (both have to pay), i think avast and AVG are pretty good free scanners.

[caldin]

yeah, i went ahead and just stuck with avast. my Iolo antivirus is up next month anyway, and i really didn't feel like paying for another for it.

[tyle6]

I got it either from a ill advised download or porn... either or... LOL

[Goliath182]

I wanted to see if i could get rid of this so i put it on my P4. AVG freaked but it didnt do a very good job cleaning it. I did some searching and found Super Antispyware (sounds like spyware lol). So far I havent seen any sign of it yet so far after useing it.

On another note this is a pretty nasty bug. That fake blue screen got me the first couple of times. :lol:

[Scott]

A good program we use to clean up stuff is ComboFix. We have it on a USB Key and clean up alot of crap with it. It does kill the bug that got you.

[caldin]

ComboFix? will have to look it up. thanks scott :P

[tyle6]

ROFL, that blue screen was a screen saver!!! for the life of me i couldn't find where it was running it from though to save it. would have been cool to grab that outta the virus and keep it as a memento screen saver.:grin: minus the control+alt+tabing or whatever you needed to get out of it

[DragonMaster]

alright, im reinstalling everything, my 500 gig hard drive is being seen as drive E now, and my dvd drive as drive D. but that shouldn't matter, as my 80gig system drive is being seen as C, right?

Easy fix : Right click My Computer, click Manage, go in Storage -> Disk Management, you can right click the volumes, and then add, remove or change the volume letter. First remove the letter for your DVD drive, then change E for D and add E for the DVD.

One problem, if you reinstalled software on E, the registry paths will be wrong. You can fix it with regedit, but it's loooooong.

You've already reinstalled the OS, but so far I've been having great success removing spyware and viruses by installing Avast! and SpyHunter Trial. (The Trial version is telling you which files and registry keys to remove for the things it detects, it's just not doing it automatically.)

If the virus, trojan or whatever added restrictive policies, then you can use Dial-a-fix to remove them, and you can repair or reinstall many things that could have been broken.

As for Avast Free, there's an easy way to make the update process invisible(Avast Scheduler settings) and use Windows policies to kill the popup ad.