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Malware, OS config issue, or bad HW

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Malware, OS config issue, or bad HW

Unread postby tns1 » January 1st, 2017, 6:32 pm

Machine: Dell 7010, i5-3470, 4GB, with all 10pro x64 updates to 12/2016
The PC was purchased used with 7pro, and since it SEEMED to be a fresh install I did an in-place upgrade to 10pro instead of doing a clean install. My bad. I only ever installed an HP printer, Libre Office, and a few anti-virus tools, nothing I have not used before on several PCs. This PC seemed to work fine for awhile, but started to take a very long time to boot or to update, or to do anything, and might show 100% disk activity for an hour or more. Randomly I might get a "failed group policy login", or "failed windows notification service", or a windows boot manager screen with "File: \Boot\BCD, status: 0x00000c1?", IO error", but the very next boot might be clean. Even when reaching the desktop it might appear to be frozen or have very slow response for every activity, even taking a very long time to shut down. After a reboot or just waiting it out, it might return to normal, very responsive behavior.

I performed a number of scans with Malwarebytes, Defender, SuperAntiSpyware, SFC /scannnow, chkdsk, but no problems were ever found. Following suggestions I also tried turning off various optional features of 10pro said to be problematic. The slow behavior might go away for a day or two but always returned. For awhile I thought this was 10pro doing silent updates in the background, but this did not compare to the only other 10pro install I had access to. Aside from malware I thought I might have a failing HD or SATA cable, but a new cable did not fix it, and chkdsk / seatools scans never found an issue. On at least two occasions rebooting started some kind of automatic file system repair (probably due to hard resets) as if the HD was failing, but this would also finish with no repairs done, no errors found.

I did fix the problem completely by putting in a new HD and doing a clean install, but I still want to investigate the issue so I have reinstalled the old HD. At this point a clean install on the old HD would only tell me if the problem was SW or HW, without any clue about malware. Can someone walk me through the detection process on that old drive and maybe I will learn something?

Attached are the FRST logs.
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tns1
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Re: Malware, OS config issue, or bad HW

Unread postby Gary R » January 3rd, 2017, 2:27 am

This forum is dedicated solely to the removal of malware from people's machines, and from the contents of the logs you've posted, and the comments you've made to the fact that no scan that you've run has detected any malware on your machine, and from the symptoms you describe, I do not believe that your problems are caused by malware.

Upgrading from an earlier version of Windows is always a "delicate" operation, and it's much more likely that your problems are caused by your transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10, than from anything else.

My advice to you, is to wipe your problematic drive, and to install a clean copy of Windows 10 to that drive, and see if that resolves things (as you say a clean install on a "new" drive did).

Anything else is outside the scope of this forum, and if you want a step to step breakdown of what went wrong with your current install, then we will have to refer you to a forum that deals with that kind of thing.
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Re: Malware, OS config issue, or bad HW

Unread postby tns1 » January 4th, 2017, 5:06 pm

I went ahead and did a clean install on that HD, and the PC continues to be very slow in operation with disk activity maxed out most of the time. It looks to be strictly a HW issue. I'll stress test the drive to see if I can get it to fail.
Thanks.
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Re: Malware, OS config issue, or bad HW

Unread postby Gary R » January 4th, 2017, 5:53 pm

If you want advice on testing the hard drive, then the following forums can probably help ...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums ... -hardware/
https://forums.whatthetech.com/index.ph ... wforum=126
http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/forum/9- ... ripherals/

... they're in no order of preference, and the quality of help at all of them is generally very good.
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