Date: 10/26/05 (Microsoft Windows)    Keywords: software, virus

Hi, long-time listener, first time caller, let me go ahead and jump right into it...

A buddy of mine at work has been having problems with his XP install so he decided to cut his losses, wipe the drive and reinstall. Perfectly normal, right? Well, here's where it gets weird...

After the numerous reboots he gets to the "Starting Windows for the first time..." screen. Everything looks normal. C:\ has tons of shit in there, everything's copacetic. He reboots the machine and it comes up to a C:\ prompt and a `dir' gives two or three files and that's it.

Allow me to reiterate that last bit to make sure everyone knows where I'm coming from, he installs XP, jumps through all the hoops, dots every i, crosses every t, everything looks good, he reboots and nothing's there.

Before you ask, "Why is he rebooting right after the install completes? Why is he doing that?", It's because the first piece of software that asked him to reboot, he did, and when the machine came back up, nothing was there.

We've checked the power supply, the RAM, formatted from an old 98SE install disk, ran the disk utility off the repair disk, ran the disk utility off the hard drive manufacturers repair disk, stuck a PCI IDE controller in the machine and installed/booted from there, no love, nothing.

At first I thought it was the IDE controller on the motherboard going bad, but it wouldn't have been able to write the OS to the hard drive to reboot for the "Starting Windows for the first time..." bit, never would've got that far.

You could say that it's never getting written to the hard drive but running from memory, but that wouldn't hold over between boots.

My latest idea is that maybe there's a boot sector virus written past the sector where XP writes the bootloader so it's not getting overwritten during reinstall, but that would get wiped during a format, wouldn't it? I've downloaded and burned a copy of Darren's Boot&Nuke (DBAN) and we're gonna try that next, but my hopes aren't that high.

Couldn't be a power supply problem, unless power supplies are wiping out OS's on reboot these days.

I would say it's a bad hard drive but it's done the same thing on two different hard drives.

The machine boots from Knoppix and runs fine, accessing the hard drives from Knoppix also works (albeit, there's nothing to look at), what the fuck is going on? I've been researching this for (going on) three weeks and I'm no closer to a solution than I was when I started. I don't think it's a hardware issue because Knoppix runs, why won't the XP install stick?

Any ideas?

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/ms_windows/48773.html