Windows 98SE, bizarre folder overwriting problem.

I have recently acquired an old vectra vli8 machine which I intended as use as a cheap broadband, dvd burning and ftping to my chipped xbox, machine but I'm experiencing a serious problem.

The specs are:-
PIII 550mhz
128 megs sd pc100 ram
40 gig maxtor primary master
24x liteon cdrom drive on the primary slave
2.1 gig seagate drive as secondary master
vli8 motherboard
3com NIC
alcatel speedtouch 330 adsl modem in the usb port.

Once I put the machine together and got all my drivers onto floppys from work the machine worked grand, I then got a pipex 1meg service and a modem. I got my modem set up no problem at all. The system was running fine for about two weeks and my partitions were swelling with stuff. One day after leaving it on all night I awoke to find the c: partition full(10gig) so I tried to transfer data to one of the 15gig partition's I'd made. I got a looping explorer error. So I powered off and rebooted.

Non systems disk, please strike a key when ready.

So I booted of floppy and dir c'd, almost every folder and file had be renamed as gibberish, and scandisk told me the sizes of the files and folders was being misreported. I immediately suspected virus so I formatted the C: and put everything I could back on without going online, I then D/l'ed the latest AniVir personal edition and scanned every disk, not a trace of a virus.

I then suspected my hardrive and bios were incompatible so I got the latest upate from HP and checked every setting, appears to be fine.

On the second install, I started to recieve IE errors after copying a file from the temporary internet folders to the destination of the download on the F: partition. I opened up C: in explorer, half of it was gibberish, tried clicking on one of the folders, explorer error, C: fecked again.

So I reinstalled again, everything going fine and I install a bunch of video codecs and some drivers. They don't appear to be working properly as I got a load of MP errors, so I go to the folders where MP is installed just to see, I notice in the windows/program files/common files I have gibberish directories and filenames.

So I reinstall and try again, this time I suspect the modem or the usb, I install everything and after its installed I try to install sound drivers, Immediatey I check the c:'s folders, 19 gigabytes of used space in the temporary internet folders, A quick scandisk sorts that out. I later installed bitorrent, checked the C: 36gig used(this is a 10 gig partition!) its the cursors folder in windows, run scandisk sorts it out, no cursors folder though.

Everything is working at the minute, I even had kazaalite running all last night and I have no errors in any folders or files, but I don't want to install anything on my machine as this appears to cause random folders in the C: pertaining to windows to become corrupted.

I checked my ram with that ramcheck386 or whatever it's called and it came up with no errors.

Any ideas? It's had me scratching my head for a couple of weeks now.

I tried to oen a dos box just now and got this error:-


A device attached to the system is not functioning

tried opening command.com and got the same error.

weird.

Welcome to windrivers miffed. I've had the same pc at home for 4 years with no problems, although I've got it running W2K w/ NTFS.

First thing I would do is download Maxtor's diagnostics and check the drive. http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

When you reinstalled, did you reformat and/or repartition? It could be that your FAT or parition table is corrupt.

Do you have DMA activated? Try disabling it and see if that has any effect.

You said you're running kazaa. That's basically an open invitation for trojans and malware to enter your system. Strongly recommend you get rid of it. Also suggest you run the online scan at http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Cheers for the welcome :)

Did'nt have DMA on the first installs, I have it on now and also my Virtual memory assigned to the slave drive.

I formatted just the C: each install as I have a lot of data I want to keep on the other partitions.

D/L'd powermax, will run in a little bit.

During the first install I had the latest version of Zonealarm and Avgwin personal edition running, would these not pick up any hacking attempts or trojans via Kazaa?

I am also using Kazaa lite which claims to be more secure than the regular one.

AVG is antivirus. It won't protect you from spyware, malware, etc. While Zonealarm will block unauthorized entry to your system, it will not block malware hidden in files you download. This is one of the major risks of ptp networking - you have no way to authenticate the source and many files made available for download via ptp are rigged for the purpose of delivering trojans. Suggest you read this http://forums.windrivers.com/showthread.php?t=57348 and at a minimum run spybot and adaware.

Cheers, i've used adaware and spybot S&D on my last machine. Also hijackthis as my browser kept getting jacked, found them to be excellent tools. I'm having problems getting an online scan started which is worrying.

Hmmm, ran the maxtor diagnostic tool, powermax, and after rebooting my C: was full of errors in the file structure.

So I loaded maxblast3 and wrote 0's to the drive to wipe it, tried to set it up so I have the dynamic disk overlay over any partitions I make and it says I don't have a maxtor ATA drive installed, and that I should buy a different piece of software to use max blast 3 on my non maxtor drive, now, its a diamondmax maxtor drive, WTF?

Now I think I'm using a standard IDE cable, does this make a difference?

Should I format the drive in Dos and then try to run maxblast on it?

I tried there tech support pages but could'nt find any mention of this.

Bios is picking the drive up fine.

Why are you running maxblast? Disk overlay software causes all kinds of problems. If you had it on there before, it is likely the reason for your problems. The vli8 will recognize a 40gig drive - you don't need the overlay. The purpose of overlay software is to allow a computer to use a drive too large for the bios.

Assuming the diagnostic found no errors, you should use powermax to do a low level format. This will completely wipe your drive, so back up whatever you need to from the other partitions. After its finished, run fdisk from a boot disk and repartition the drive. If you don't have boot disk, you can download one here: http://www.bootdisk.com/ Then format the drive from the bootdisk.

OK, you filled your hard drive and windows could not boot as it could not make enough room for swap files etc. Did you turn off kazaa's ability to share your c: drive with the world? Frankly if you install a virus superhighway, then you must expect to be at risk.

If you have ata66 capable motherboard ide, then yes 80 conducter cable is what you need... the older cables are not shielded well enough to run at ata66 speed and above, thus creating data errors. From what I can tell this is only an ata33 interface, so the problem may well be that the maxtor needs to be "stepped down" so that it is running at the right speed. Maxtor has a tool for this for some drives that do not step down correctly.

Why are you trying to put a bios overlay on the drive? This is used ONLY as a last resort when the bios will not support hard drives over a certain size. have you updated the bios?

I did'nt have the overlay installed previously as windows and the bios were reporting the disk size correctly. I was trying to put it on this time just in case. *embarassed*

I'll leave it off. The problem really is that files and folders become corrupted and report ludricrously high file sizes and are named with random characters, some of which I did'nt even know existed.

I had kazaa just sharing a shared folder on a partition conatining only some rars and a couple of video files.

And yes I have updated to the latest bios from the hp site.

Seems to occur after I install my usb adsl modem drivers and then try to install other programs and device drivers.

I have an IDE cable that came with a CDR/RW drive about a year ago that has never been used, I think I'll use it instead of the 5/6 year old cable that was in the box.

The random file names and the bizarre sizes is a direct result of downloading something from kazaa... I have seen it many a time.

But Its happened over several formats of the C: and my virus software never found any problems.

Also Installers downloaded and kept on another partition between reinstalls do not appear to be valid, I get 'not a valid win32 application' error.

Installed antivirus programs often cannot find preexisting infections..the machine should be clean prior to installing any antivirus. If you are having problems with Panda Activescan, try Housecall from trend Micro as an online scan

Cheers for all the advice fellas, I'll leave kazaa and other P2P clients off, make sure I'm using the right cable and carry out an online scan when I get home from work tonight. I'll let you know how I get on.

Virus free and running after an online scan, I discovered upon checking my hdd cable that the screws I'd used to mount the drive were loose and that it rattled around as I tried to take out the power cable. So now its securely mounted.

I'm now going to upgrade my usb drivers to the newest possible and hopefully that'll be the end of any issues.

Cheers for all your help, will bump if It occurs again and I need your help.