Advice PC Stopped Working

[Rubber Bullets]

Hi All,

I turned my desktop on this morning, just a few hours after I switched it off last night with no obvious problems, and found that it had a message on screen saying that windows had found a disc problem and urging me to back it up. Whilst I was thinking about this it started doing odd stuff, (the show hidden icons area was flickering when I opened it, odd programs started opening and closing, and each time I clicked the start button the PC went into some sort of sleep mode) .

It is running Win7 64 bit and has 2 1TB hard drives, one with Windows and the majority of my programs on, and the other as a back up for my music, photos, videos and some of my Steam folder.

I turned it of and pulled both hard drives and have put an old one back in and installed Win7 again, and that appears to be working fine.

I have an external caddy that I have put the old c drive in and have copied some of the more important stuff from it onto another PC.

I am currently doing a virus check on that drive from my laptop. So far I can't find any issue with that drive. It is possible that it is the data drive which was faulty, but I can't imagine why it would have made the pc act as it did.

I have not encountered anything like this before. The odd behaviour is more reminiscent of a virus than what I would expect of a failing drive, but I am normally pretty cautious and have never had one before, and run Security Essentials anyway.

Any ideas? Should I try and reinstall the old C drive in the PC and reinstall windows? Is the disc not worth risking? Perhaps I should buy a nice new SSD and make a new boot drive.

Any help very welcome, though any decision on what to do will have to wait as I am away from tomorrow for a week.

Thanks

RB

 

[Rubber Bullets]

So the Scan is still happening, but there is a message already:

Preliminary scan results show that malicious or potentially unwanted software might exist on your system. You can review detected items when the scan has completed.

So far the scan time is 30 mins, and judging by the speed it's going it could take a few hours more!

RB

 

[Raven]

Tinfoil hat moment but if programs are opening and closing randomly then it sound like remote access of some kind.

 

[Raven]

Also, have a go with MalwareBytes as well as your normal scan.

 

[Rubber Bullets]

Thanks Raven. In some ways the best outcome would be if there si something on the drive that I can identify and remove and then just plug it back into the PC and carry on as normal! It would save the whole process of reloading everything from scratch.

Fingers crossed

RB

 

[Rubber Bullets]

So the scan finally finished, and found Trojan:Win32/Instonarch.A

Category: Trojan

Description: This program is dangerous and executes commands from an attacker.

Recommended action: Remove this software immediately.

Items:
containerfile:G:\Program Files (x86)\eRightSoft\SUPER\00IM.exe
file:G:\Program Files (x86)\eRightSoft\SUPER\00IM.exe->(nsis-1-BingInstaller.exe)
file:G:\Program Files (x86)\eRightSoft\SUPER\00IM.exe->(nsis-1-RealInstaller.exe)

This is the link it gave, but it doesn't give any more info.

So it certainly looks like this could have been the reason for the issues I had. What are the chances that if I plug the HDD back into my PC, after cleaning it through the caddy, that it will be OK. I'll do a malwarebytes scan as well, but should I do anything else? I have no idea how I picked it up.

RB

 

[Bob007]

Generally used to install other things. In it's self opens up access to your machine. From the sounds of it you were mind way into having a load of crap dumped on you.

If/when you plug it back in. I would make sure the current drive you are on is removed from the system. No network connection. Make sure you have a copy of Malwarebytes ready to go on the system*. At the least you should be able to run a scan with that. Let it finish, reboot, clean up infections. Then plug in network cable, update Malwarebytes. scan, reboot, finish clean up.

As I said, this is more of infection to get other infections on your pc. Might be the tip of the iceberg.

*if you can't install Malwarebytes, boot into safe mode and start the windows installer service. try installing again.

 

[MYstIC G]

This would seem reasonably comprehensive

http://www.fixyourbrowser.com/removal-instructions/remove-win32-installmonetizer-ab/

Don't forget to patch all your out of date software immediately if you do go back to your original drive.

 

[Rubber Bullets]

Thanks G. I ran Malwarebytes on the drive, still as an external drive to my laptop, and it didn't find anything else so I am hopeful. I'll not have tine to reinstall before I go away now, but will do it when I get back. Thanks for the input guys, and I'll be back if anything goes wrong

RB