What is this garbage in my win.ini file, shown in the attachment, and where did it come from. I suspect this may be one of the reasons why my system crashes every few minutes.
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What is this garbage in my win.ini file, shown in the attachment, and where did it come from. I suspect this may be one of the reasons why my system crashes every few minutes.
When I was running 98 I had the same thing happen to my autoexec.bat and config.sys files. However, there weren't any good lines left, it was all gibberish. After I reinstalled the OS, I kept copies of all the system files. I never did figure out what had caused it.
I'd scoot over to c:\windows\sysbckup and figure out which was the most recent one of the rb000x.cab files - open it with winzip and extract the win.ini file from it.
Scandisk (preferably from DOS)!
As it's an untitled attachment it smells like a virus to me.....
Topdog,
The attachment itself didn't smell like a virus to me. Perhaps the gibberish shown in the bitmap was the result of a virus, but the attached file should be perfectly safe to download. "Untitled1" is the default name that MSPAINT pics when you create a new .BMP and then save it without changing the filename. Nothing unusual there. And, since it's a .BMP anyway, it can have all the viruses it wants in it-- it won't execute them because the .BMP extension says to load it with a picture viewer or graphics editor, not to execute it like a program.
rednek tek,
I looked at the file-- yes, there is some gibberish in there. If you start, run "sysedit" you can strip it out. It sounds like perhaps there were some crosslinked files, or that maybe win.ini was loaded in MS Word, not Notepad, and then the gibberish you see is formatting information added by MSWORD. Or, it could have been caused by a virus.
hmm, I don't think it is a virus.
I play Starcraft Brood war on Battle.net, and I get alot of this garbage, I figure I don't have a program or Letter type to display these charatchers corretly, so it just displays %^%%^$$#$^%%_~~@#@$#@#
and when I play a map, it has different colored words when I open Starcraft Editor, it got a I in front of the sentence, so I belive the I is a hack to change colors or somthing. I really don't know.:confused:
Consider my hand smacked!!! Jumped in with my eyes shut....:D
No viruses I'm aware of or can locate. I religiously keep Norton updated. Recent reload of Windows. I am getting a lot of crosslinked file, invalid time stamp, allocation, and lost cluster errors. One thing I have noticed recently is that right before the system crashes, I will hear my CD burner spin up, even though not using it. Could something about DMA be horribly screwed up?
I finally ended up formatting and reloading Windows. The situation regressed to the point that all file associations were lost and I couldn't open shortcuts, programs, etc. I found other problems as well and I finally got tired of dealing with it.
If you are getting crosslinked files, I would start to worry about the integrity of your disk drive.
Lost file fragments (generally) are as a result of doing a reboot with files open and being created or updated, or programs failing or using ctl-alt-del to kill programs. BUT, it you are getting a substantial number of Lost File Fragments, then your directory/fat is most likely damaged and scandisk is viewing your legitimate files as being invalid.
Do not run scandisk with autofix.
In this case, if you had the selection to delete lost file fragments, you are losing "real" files.
As pointed out, the garbage looks like it came as a result of a crosslink. If you have Copy as your Scandisk option, then when there are crosslinks, the cluster in common is given to all files involved. This means ONE is probably OK but all the rest are Corrupt.
With autofix on, you will never see these errors unless you view the scandisk.log file (IF you have logging set).
With auto fix off, you get to see all of the errors. And you get to stop scandisk, before it does serious damage to your files by "fixing" them.