Windows 10: Malware or drive failure? Machine is crippled

Hello,
My gaming rig has recently been brought to it's knees. Windows 10 is able to boot up (a bit slowly), but afterwards, I am not able to do anything. I've seen everything stop by hovering over the icons in my taskbar (the hovering animations froze), the animation over the start menu remain while nothing happening...etc.

I am able to move the mouse and the keyboard responds. Loading what icons I have on my desktop takes a few minutes.

I am not sure if this is a result of malware of a driver failure - but I am pretty sure it is the hard drive, as I put it in a second machine and saw the same slow results.

I have tried accessing the troubleshooting methods that will pop up on the boot screen. I let it attempt to restore an older point for about 24 hours, and I let it attempt to reinstall windows while keeping my files for about 17 hours.
Through this same menu I accessed safe mode and it everything stopped responding very shortly there as well.

I recall doing 2 things before this started happening - I updated Nvidia drivers which did give me an error at first (don't remember what), and I also noticed that Malware Bytes wasn't turning on with Windows and I tried out the "self-protection" thing. I'm wondering if perhaps all my resources are being used up with the 2 fighting it out (the possible malware and malware bytes)... but I'm not sure if that would be expected to slow down everything else I described, like reinstalling Windows.

Any tips?

:)

 

Malware

Does microsoft automatically send update patch to counteract malware that crippled UK NHS(ransomware)? If not, what must one do? My system is windows 10 version 1511. Thanks guys.Brian

 

Not Enough Disk Space for Anniversary Update

I don't see why my fix won't work for other people. Of course, we're always going to be stuck with our minimal 32GB hard drives, but it's possible to work around it and make the crippled machine become useful.

 

Hi adamgm and welcome to Tenforums.
You can see if it is indeed an infection by booting to Kyhi's rescue media, and running MBAM on your HDD that way, while it's not active (use the mirror to download). You can also run chkdsk while in that environment to see if your drive is failing. Please make sure you set MBAM to scan for rootkits (that's not checked by default), treat PUPs and PUMs as malware, and do the custom scan to get the entire drive. While you're at it, back up your data, if you need to.

Let us know how it goes.

 

Thanks for the response!
An iso on a usb is just copied to it?

 

Yes, right-click the ISO and select MOUNT, then copy all the files to your USB.

EDIT: Please make sure you update the virus definitions in MBAM before you run it.

 

I will give this a shot tomorrow and will post back.

 

Hey this could also be a problem with a runaway process, did you check the task manager to see if your disk, cpu or memory performance is pegged at a high percent? It also could be a problem with hardware like the hard drive if you find the machine is freezing, locking up or rebooting.

 

Sounds like a plan. *Smile

 

I wasn't even able to open the task manager unfortunately - so I have no idea. I considered this and tried to check...

So, I'm in using the rescue media and ran chkdsk, looks like it found problems:

EDIT: that's embarrassing, I forgot to change to my actual hard drive.
Secondary drive that doesn't have windows on it was fine. Currently running it on my main drive, the only suspicious thing (maybe) is that it now re-named it to F instead of E.

 

Yeah, typical when you boot to the WinPESE environment. Will be good to know if it checks out okay or not. Did you run MBAM yet, or no?

 

Not yet, started with checkdisk.
It's still running on my main drive, not sure if taking this long is indicative of something. It has stopped for a few minutes at 2 points.

 

It took a long time, but apparently it's good?

F:\>chkdsk
The type of the file system is NTFS.

WARNING! F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...


688640 file records processed.

File verification completed.


23688 large file records processed.


0 bad file records processed.

Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...


917472 index entries processed.

Index verification completed.


0 unindexed files scanned.


0 unindexed files recovered.

Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
Security descriptor verification completed.


114417 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...


41065296 USN bytes processed.

Usn Journal verification completed.

Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.

976196607 KB total disk space.
317130556 KB in 525824 files.
307052 KB in 114418 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
835811 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
657923188 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
244049151 total allocation units on disk.
164480797 allocation units available on disk.
Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50.

 

I'm not sure if I have to do anything special to run a program off of a drive I'm not technically on... trying to launch mbam.exe is giving me a .dll error (sfc.dll).

 

Please sit tight - I'm doing some checking....

Good news on the chkdsk.