The Long Road

So I had what the worst PC virus last month. I havent had any virii in years and I'm not even sure what I did to get this one. Christmas Eve 2007, I was playing a game of DOTA when my computer completely froze, I reboot and login to windows to find a bunch of new icons on my desktop and other various and sundry signs of infection. I run a scanner, sure enough it finds a few things, I quarantine all these files and reboot once more. This is when problems start. I can no longer get into windows. As soon as I login, it logs me out right away. Not even safemode worked, and not even the great Anderson Quach was able to help me out. I spent maybe a good 3-4 hours trying to get in or getting my files out (even going as far as downloading a couple of linux distros and booting off the disk drive) without success. Eventually my brother got home and did something or other and 30 minutes later I was in windows copying stuff and getting ready to reinstall XP.

One of the virus' effects is that it rewrote every HTML document on my PC into a page with a link to a exe it put into the system folder. I keep a lot of documents in HTML format, including an HTML version of my resume and more importantly a list of graphic novels that I'm interested in which I update every month. This 6 year old document is now completely gone. What the hell am I going to buy now? Whenever I ran out of reading material, I used to be able to scan through it, pick a few books and send off a list to my dealer. Now I have no clue what's available anymore, nor what I was interested in getting. This is vexing.

Maybe less trivially is that Firefox would not start properly once my brother had gotten me back into windows. This means that I wasn't able to extract my bookmarks from it. That REALLY sucks. I keep a copy of my bookmarks online but that file is outrageously outdated. Amongst the more important bookmarks I have to retrace now are the ones pertaining to my research on Home Theater, and the dozens of links related to the non-day job.

Thankfully though, that virus only messed up HTML documents. I would be really angry if it wiped out all my TXT files (passwords!!) or DOC files, or the worst of all, XLS files. Shit, I have so many excel files it would be crippling to lose them.

Maybe I'll make a backup tonight.

Replies: 5 comments

Very unlucky. Good thing your bro is a Dell whiz...;). As for passwords, you should keep them elsewhere....or just in your head...:P.

Posted by dAN @ 01/09/2008 07:30 PM EST

we now have an external hdd, so start backin up :P

and it only took me 15mins!

Posted by Anonymous @ 01/09/2008 11:27 PM EST

thats what you get for downloading hentai games :P

Posted by Dave @ 01/10/2008 11:13 AM EST

You can't possibly be viewing more porn than I, :P!

Posted by dAN @ 01/11/2008 08:51 AM EST

I have too many passwords to keep in my head.

and, dave, i heard you liked that "other" beach volleyball game.

Posted by Long @ 01/11/2008 10:46 AM EST