Computer help please

Cant you just use the ‘FORMAT’ command plus lots of free stuff on softpedia.com or tucows.com to name a few

This lot do them at £52 plus VAT.

You’ll probably find them a bit cheaper if you look around.

Your 55plus vat is near enough not to matter my 62. Phew, I neve like paying more than the next guy ha ha.

Who does them at £55? My £62 was at 7dayshop.

This lot do them at £52 plus VAT.

You’ll probably find them a bit cheaper if you look around.

Vista’s “Disk Management” tool (Control Panel: Administrative Tools: Computer Management: Storage: Disk Management) is fairly easy to use for removing and creating partitions (even for external drives), “Swissknife” is a good third party application that has the added benefit of being able to format partitions as FAT32 so that they can be read by Macs or earlier MS operating systems that don’t like NTFS (which is the native format for XP/Vista).

However, given that you’ve got an older drive that’s been sitting around for a while and considering that the cost of larger capacity hard drives is very reasonable (you can get a 1 Tb drive for £55), I’d be more inclined to buy a new hard drive for external storage to reduce the risk of the older one expiring.

Who does them at £55? My £62 was at 7dayshop.

The best tool for this is “Partition Magic”. It isn’t a freeware though. Do a google, there may be offers.

Using the HDD as an external backup is exactly what I do, I bought the lead(s) to USB and a Terrabyte HDD. The HDD was £62, outrageously cheap. The beauty of those leads is that you can have dozens of external HDD’s if you wish, far cheaper than a pukka external drive.
Nowthen, if you use it as a backup (Proper incremental backup not just copy/paste) then beware of backing up anything from the C partition drive. The PC sees the C: root and isn’t sure if that’s it’s start-up source. It then won’t uninstall using the usual USB eject process. My PC HDD is C for Software, D for Myware and E for anything that talks to the web. The C holds my faves and desktop and that’s all I added (From C) to my backup, causing the slight fault as above.

You first of all need to remove all the data that you want to keep from it.

Then set up a new partition covering the whole drive. You can do it in MS-DOS but you might find it easier to use a drive utility such as Maxblast (BUT it says it only works with Maxtor drives) See: http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=MaxBlast_5&vgnextoid=7add8b9c4a8ff010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Or, wait a little while and no doubt an IT technician will drop by with better advice. 🙂

One can avoid all the crap with Microsoft and their service packs by using Linux.

I use it on my laptop and at my P.C. at work but the main computer at home has Windows XP as thats what the rest of my family want but I am going to install Linux alongside Windows when I get round to it.

The thing with Blaster and other worms and virus’s etc is their made by saddo type geeks who are 100% obsesed with their computers and care about sod all else.
So why on earth do they set up virus’s to wreck the things ? its like they wanna ruin the only thing that means anything to them.

Well it seems to be a mixed reception for SP2.
I downloaded it and……… “touchwood” no probelms (but then how would one know until Bill told you ?). Other’s however seem to have encountererd a nightmare. Best wait awaile I think

Ok, I finally think it’s fixed. I have Norton Firewall on my main machine and rely on Windows Firewall for my second machine. I checked these settings tonight after reading some thing on a post about vulnerabilities if the Firewall is not switched on and it wasn’t. I switched it on for both Internet and Networking and I’ve been online for over an hour! Fingers crossed that this was the problem. I have updated all the latest patches and fixes from the Windows Update site as well. I’m still a bit cautious about re-installing SP2 though, so I’m leaving it uninstalled for now.

Thanks everyone for all your ideas and suggestions, you’ve been a big help :).

Regards Plazz

Its a security loop hole in windows, make sure you have applied all patches for XP. The basics is that someone has found your machine on the net and has shut it down using the loop hole. A full windows patch should fix it.

Try looking here:

http://www.able2know.com/forums/a2k-post320213.html
http://www.able2know.com/forums/about10449.html
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10489

I don’t know if any of that helps?

Just Spent the morning re-running Virus scans on both machines in safe mode. Out come still the same, aaaaaaarrrggggggghhhhhh

Plazz

When using tools to remove sasser and blaster it is best to use then in “safe mode”

WM

Indeed webby, I forgot to add that. 😮

When using tools to remove sasser and blaster it is best to use then in “safe mode”

WM

If you type ‘status code 1073741819’ into google it comes up with reams of stuff.
sounds like you have a sasser or blaster in there somewhere, try temporarily turning off system restore and then doing a scan.

Hi All,

Thanks for the replies and assistance but unfortunately I’m am still having the same problem. I have Norton Anti-Virus 2004 installed and updated, I scanned my system and it came back ‘no Viruses found’. Just to be on the safe side I downloaded both the MS Blast and Sasser fix tools from Symantec, run them and you can see the results for yourselves in the pictures below. I did until recently have service pack 2 installed on my main machine, but every time I booted up it would ask for Activation and I would go online and comply. However, for 30 odd days I did this only eventually to have my PC stop working until the software was activated. Being both OEM versions of Windows XP, I am not entitled to support from Microsoft. So the big Format C: back to SP1 was the order of the day! It’s my second machine that has the problem though. They are networked together and both have 56k modems (I cant get broadband until June 2005). If I connect to the Internet through my first machine the second can connect to the Internet through it (All works fine). If I connect direct to the Internet through the second machine 20 seconds later the shutdown dialogue box appears. The thing is that I don’t always have both machines switched on and I use either to get on the net, well I used to!

If you have anymore Ideas or need any more info please let me know I am very grateful for all the help so far.

Thanks, Plazz

It has some nasty gliches in it, like turning off your automatic mail send/recieve.

Not sure we have seen all of them arrive yet, SP1 is worth adding for Office though I found.

And good advice, put all Microsoft security patches (windows Update). Just for SP2, I’d personally wait a bit, till we are sure it runs fine.

There is a fix for it on either Norton (which we used) or McAfee. It’s easy enough to get rid of it. 😀

Hope this helps – those silly blaster worms are a real nuisance!

Regards,
Snaps

On BT Broadband? Yep I would agree, have you got upto date anti virus?