MBR was fubbared.
Not very happy with the wife. I told her to NEVER play the free online
games. She ignored my warning and was playing a game online. She saw
an email from our attorney, stopped the game and tried to open the
PDF. The PDF locked up her system and when she rebooted it was stuck
in a continuous loop. So it came from the game site or from the PDF.
I'm not going to try opening the PDF myself to see if it was the
source. It comes up clean with MSSE.
Now I am spending my Saturday restoring her PC. It's a royal PITA.
She is VERY apologetic. I plan to use that to my advantage tonight.
After you restore your PC, make an image of it...I prefer Macrium
Reflect. Next time is will take you 30 minutes to restore the image.
You can get the links from my website:
"IMAGING YOUR SYSTEM
DO IT NOW!
The single most important aspect of a computer recovery is to be able to
re-image your computer easily. There is no silver bullet or suite of
software that can guarantee you will not become infected. There is no
guarantee or certain way to know that you will be able to clean all of
the malware if you become infected and even so, that process can actually
take longer than re-imaging your computer. Making an image of your system
is the fastest and best solution for hard drive failure or recovering
from malware infections. It is also something anyone can do easily
regardless of their level of technical knowledge.
The act of restoring an image, completely erases the contents of your
hardrive/partition and rewrites the entire contents of the image. If this
image is an image of your active partition (partition on a hard drive set
as the bootable partition and contains the operating system) it will
completely restore your system as it was at that time. Making an image of
your system can reduce complete system restoration time to thirty minutes
or less and it is very easy to do. This is the best overall protection
you can have. I cannot stress the importance this enough.
First you should obtain an external hard drive and create backup folders
on that drive. (You can use CD/DVDs to copy your images to, however,
multiple CD/DVDs will be needed and how many depends on how large your
drive is.) Before you make a restoration image, update your programs, run
deep scans with your antivirus and manual scanners, clean and defragment
your machine in order to get as clean an image as possible.
Download and install your backup imaging program. I recommend Macrium
Reflect. Macrium Reflect on first run prompts you to create a boot CD.
Insert a blank CD and make one. Next, create your backup image and save
it to your external hard drive. To restore your image, place the Macrium
Reflect boot CD in your CD drive and restart. Then connect your external
hard drive, and follow the wizards. It is that simple.
Video1 showing how to create an image with Macrium Reflect, and Video2
showing how to restore an image with Macrium Reflect which was made about
one year ago though it is still current enough to provide you the
necessary information.
HowToGeek reviews how to use Macrium Reflect.
It is an easy process and I highly recommend to have a backup image of
your entire system which will make it painless to restore your operating
system to the last clean image you made in the event of a castastrophy.
Also remember to make new images periodically when your system changes
significantly.
Tip: Keep the last few images you make as you may discover a corrupt
image or make a dirty image (system not clean when you make the image).
Tip: If you are not sure your system is clean, it may be worth the effort
to restage your computer with your factory restoration CDs or on hard
drive restoration factory images, reload the Windows updates, reinstall
your programs, data files and settings and then make an image. This may
take a long time, but it is worth having an image of your computer in a
pristine state.
Tip: With Macrium Reflect, you can Browse or Explore an image by mounting
the image file in Windows Explorer. This makes the image appear as a
drive in Windows Explorer that you can access just like any other drive
and has its own drive letter. With Marium Reflect, the image is mounted
as read only. This means that you cannot change the contents of image but
you can copy files from the mounted image in Windows Explorer to your PC.
You can also open files (such as WORD documents) by double clicking. To
mount the image, right click on the image file in Windows Explorer and
select 'Explore Image.' Select the partition from your image you wish to
view. Your image partition will be displayed in Windows Explorer with its
own drive letter with all of the files and folders that were on your
computer when you made the image."
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I don't get
ata (the remainder) or a second disc needs tb designated as