Friday, December 30, 2005

Wish me luck.

I have to replace my hard drive.

My firewall software took a dump and now my drive has been fucked up from an unfortunate influx of all kinds of nasty things. Since the only sites I visit are my email (yahoo), some blogs, myspace and Defamer, I'm wondering who's fault this is.

Since I've never changed a hard drive before, I may just end up fucking up my computer (I may not - it can't be that hard, can it?), so hopefully I'll continue to have internet access.

So, today I've got to back up the stuff I want to keep (all my photos, my blog backup, phone book, etc), and tonight I'm going to put in the new drive.

Hopefully I'll be successful - if not I'm doomed to posting everything from the internet cafe until I can make this work.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not hard at all. Just make sure that you have all of your operating system disks with ya! I'll be more than happy to help. My email is rickbenjamin@gmail.com. Oh and IMO, great blog! Thanks

Spike said...

Zone Alarm firewall is okay. And free.

Anonymous said...

My advice would be to slow down a bit and not do anything rash.

Replacing a hard drive and getting back to the state you were at before your firewall went dead is likely to be non-trivial.

You don't want to just buy a drive and use the manufacturer's software to duplicate the disk because you'll just be duplicating all of the crap that installed itself while your firewall was down.

My suggestion would be to _first_ go get a hardware router (linksys is a good brand) and put it between your dsl or cable modem and your computer. All consumer routers have built in firewalls that give you much better protection than a software firewall.

Second, install AdAware and give it a run. It's likely that it will find most of what was installed on your drive while the firewall was non-operational. AdAware is free.
Just google it.

Then, and only then, if I still had
problems I'd go buy a new harddrive.
But be prepared to spend lots of time
backing up important data on the old
drive, reinstalling the operating
system, reinstalling all of your
applications, setting up your
preferences for everything again, etc.

It's really not a lot of fun.

Anonymous said...

As to who's fault it is? Script kiddies.

There are applications that do nothing but port scan on random ip addresses. It's absolutely freaking astonishing how little time it takes to get hit.

About a year ago, I hooked up a computer straight to a dsl modem with no firewall at all and in about 10 minutes all sorts of software and crap had been installed on my machine.

Anonymous said...

Hey,
Sorry to hear about your problem. The AdAware suggestion above is right on. I would add SpyBot and run both of them before changing drives. These free programs really helped me out of a similar mess not long ago. Best of luck.

TheOldTimer

Merujo said...

Changing out a hard drive is a breeze. For you - no sweat at all!

Happy New Year!

Merujo
(a regular reader in DC)

Peggy Archer said...

OMG - so easy. It took me five minutes to put the new one in, and three hours to back up and virus check the stuff from the old drive.

Anon - thanks for the advice, but I've tried it all. I've got all the anti-spyware, and there's something out there that's disabling them (adaware and spybot) and ZoneAlarm. There's crap in that old drive that a sandblaster won't get out.

It's all good now!

Anonymous said...

Hurrah... I was sure that if it came down to changing drives an old juicer like you would be the right one to get it done. Did you have to use your T wrench and 4/0? BTW Happy New Year...

TheOldTimer

The Alan Heitz Show said...

I dunno. Just do whatever. Oh and Happy New Year. I hope this year brings you more work and stardom like the rest of us. What does that mean? I don't know but I'm gearing up for pilot season muthafucka!

BTW, nice blog. Thanks!

Your Myspace friend. Heitzie.

Anonymous said...

Hard drives come and go. Wondows machines seem to be especially prone to the drives crapping out I've noticed. In the last six months I have replaced, hmm, 5. This is out of a population of about 20 that I am responsible for the care and feeding of. And this is just the past six months mind you.

In each case the first symptoms were general sluggishness and diminished operating response. In all but 1 case I found a number of spyware/malware devices installed and after removing them (McAfee is my nuke of choice for this) they still took too long to boot and ran slow. I concluded that there was something getting loaded before McAfee. The hardware guys just call it a bad HD. So it looks to me like either some disk makers are getting really sloppy (as this is a much higher failure rate than I've seen before) or some of this malware is indeed getting in under the protection and/or damaging the disk or hiding itself in such a way that makes the disk appear bad.

Of course I typically run my network from my trusty Macintosh which is running happily on the original hard disk. Let's see, how many Macs have I replaced a bad disk on: 1 or 2. Out of a population of...40 or so over 20 years. (OK, I know the ones back in '84 & '85 didn't have hard disks yet.)

Why screw around with Windows if you don't have to? If you have the bucks get an iBook w/ a 3yr Apple Care and be covered for just about anything that is going to happen to it that doesn't leave a face print on the screen. Or watch craigslist for a used one. The cat & mouse game between hackers & msft will not stop as long as windows is proprietary and users will pay for it in ways that make the Mac "premium" seem pretty cost effective.

Anonymous said...

i totally agree with kirk - macs rule, pc's, well they just suck don't they? ;) always been a mac user and my husband has been a mac tech guru for going on close to 15 years. once you go mac you don't want to go back!

Anonymous said...

Check out the reviews on PCcillin. I have not had a computer dumped on since I loaded it. I had bad experience with Norton. Never used MacAfee, but hear it uses too much of your computer's time and memory.

Tony Neece