Cleaning up Seagate after Malware attack...

[rollie]

Hi. I'm trying to clean up my Seagate 250 after a Malware infection. I'm not sure if it's infected or not, but I don't want to take any chances after what I've just been through, in this situation.
I downloaded Panda Vaccine. I inserted a Store-n-Go Flash Drive and vaccinated my computer and the flash drive. Then I plugged in the Seagate and this showed up in the little box;
"NTFS not supported." (Nothing appeared to happen)

Then I downloaded Bitdefender. Just to try it, I inserted a Flash Drive and Bitfender immunized it. I plugged in the Seagate and nothing happened. The McAfee window did not even pop-up to scan as it did with the Store-n-Go Flash Drive. What is not right here?

I have;
Lenovo ThinkPad R61 Laptop
Windows Vista Home Premium SP2
4.00GB
32-Bit

[rollie]

I thought I started this thread in the Hardware Forum. If there was a reply, i must have missed it....

[fink]

Can you see the drive in disk management? Control panel>admin tools>computer management>storage/disk management.

[rollie]

I found "storage/disk management", but no it is not there. It is not plugged in. I probably sound really paranoid but I've been nervous about plugging it in.

[fink]

It would not show up in disk management unless it is plugged in.

You said you already tried to plug it in so trying again won't do anything different than the first time. If you don't plug it in you can't find out what the problem might be or if the drive even works.

It could also be a cable problem or the USB port might be damaged.. try another.

[rollie]

I plugged it in and it is there in the disk management windoe, plus it says it is Health (Active, Primary Partition).

[fink]

Can you navigate to it in my computer/windows explorer? Don't open any executable files just in case there are some that are infected but if you can navigate to it then you should be able to do an a/v scan with your a/v program. I'd also do an online scan with eset scanner for extra confirmation of the results..

http://www.eset.com/us/online-scanner/

[fink]

Also, I don't use anything Mcafee but did it used to give you a message when you plugged in the drive? Or just with flash drives? I'd be a bit surprised if your scanner would run a scan automatically every time you plugged in an external hard drive (as opposed to a flash drive which is a different kettle of fish)

[rollie]

Mcafee did not give a message when I would plugged it in. I ran 3 scans, Windows Defender, Malwarebytes and ESET. They came out clean. Everything seems to be working okay except for this;
Upon restarting the computer this message came up almost immediately--
"Cannot create shell notification icon."

this happened after I ran the Temporary File cleaner. So rebooting seems to take alot longer.

[fink]

That message will appear when a startup program is unable to create an icon in systray when you boot the computer. Is there a program associated with that message? If the message is in a box then the program might be in the top margin.

Have a look at this MS article on how to investigate startup problems..

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

I think it's safe to think that the drive is clean so at this point I'll move this to a forum where it's more applicable.

[rollie]

It was the Panda USBvaccine program. I uninstalled it. I also did a clean boot following the directions on the link you sent. It worked and everything seems to be running well.

[rollie]

Perhaps I spoketh to soon. Everything seems to be okay, except the start-up is really slow. I did the clean boot, msconfig.exe (Hide all MS Services and Disable All) and it worked really well--start up was fast. So then I went back in to enable what I had disabled. Rebooted and man was it slow. My question is, can I just disable the MS Services and run it that way all the time, or not?

[SpywareDr]

Repeat the clean boot process again but this time don't re-able everything you had disabled, just re-enable two or three and reboot.

If start up is still fast, then you know the problem isn't the two or three you just re-enabled. So you could now re-enable two or three more and try again, etc., etc, etc.

If start up is s-l-o-w, then you know the problem *-is-* one or more of the ones you just re-enabled. So disable one of the ones you just re-enabled and try again.

In other words, process of elimination.

[rollie]

Thanks for the reply...just wanted to let you know that I may not be able to perform this task for a day or so; just got really busy. I'll post back as soon as I can.

[rollie]

Well, it seems to be doing better now. Maybe just leaving alone for awhile helped . But I know what to do now if it gets slow again.