1.) Several Months ago, when the ZOTOB worm hit the news, a day or two earlier (6 Aug.) I got hit...
Symptoms:
CODE
WinXP went into a restart/shutdown mode, Ewido caught 3 files that wanted to be changed, the reboot happened too quick for me to write down the files in question...
well upon reboot, the system could not find my HD... H*ll, I thought Drive C: gone down the tubes... popped in BartPE, in order to see if I could still access the drive, and found out the other Partition was also gone... Hmmm, strange... Booted into BIOS and did an AutoDetect on the Drive, now it gets even stranger, the drive in question was a WD400EB 0CPFC but the BIOS detected it as a "WD501BB 0CPF0 !!!!!!!!!"... Now I new something was up... Cleared the BIOS, loaded BIOS Defaults, Saved and EXIT the thing, and WinXP bootet up with no problem...
well upon reboot, the system could not find my HD... H*ll, I thought Drive C: gone down the tubes... popped in BartPE, in order to see if I could still access the drive, and found out the other Partition was also gone... Hmmm, strange... Booted into BIOS and did an AutoDetect on the Drive, now it gets even stranger, the drive in question was a WD400EB 0CPFC but the BIOS detected it as a "WD501BB 0CPF0 !!!!!!!!!"... Now I new something was up... Cleared the BIOS, loaded BIOS Defaults, Saved and EXIT the thing, and WinXP bootet up with no problem...
2.) Several Months later (actually Yesterday) I powered down my PC once again, and the exact same Problem with the DRIVE RECOGNITION happend once more... but this time I could not RESET the BIOS and have the DRIVE correctly Recognized, even after leaving the BATTERY out for 10 min and having the PC unhooked from the Powersource (holding and pressing the start button to deplete the CAPS)... I then hooked up the drive to my PCI-IDE card and there it got correctly recognized and is functioning without a problem (ran DIAG from Western Digital on it)...
3.) since in my 20+ yrs, I have never came across this type of problem at all except in the last 4 months... Now my question: Is there a Virus/Worm/Trojan out there that affects the BIOS (like the old and venerable KILL-CMOS) out now that I may have missed in the past few months? or what else could be afoot?
4.) System is an ASUS P4PE-x running a Cellie at 2.8ghz, 1024mb RAM, PSU at 550w Namebrand, with the latest BIOS 1007, PCI-IDE from Promise, 3 HDD and two Optical Drives... Ran EWIDO, AntiViral, AntiSpyware (3 different) and HJT, NOTHING unusual found... Browser in USE is FireFox 1.5 with Kerio Personal Firewall... No P2P or strange DL's from funky/-- not allowed here -- sites... the only thing that I had changed before this happened was installing a new version (5.12) of the ATI Catalyst Drivers (DL from ATI website and two reboots in between with no adverse effects)...
Hopefully someone may enlighten this stumped old f*rt of a PC enthusiast...
Thank you in advance...
at GSF forums