Oh great...fuckin great....

[Aegis]

I had W32.pinfi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Almost impossible to get rid of, crashes alsorts including the latest version of norton. It creates temp files that eat up all the memory until they cause a memory leak situation and does some other stuff too, you'll notice your entire system is running slow. Install you drive(s) on another clean PC as a slave and run Norton AS SOON AS IT BOOTS UP, this should clear it beofre norton gets infected, if it does get infected you mgiht be able tos stop it by deleting every occurance of W32.pinfi and all the .tmp files created since. Basically its a right pain in the arse. Oh, and it somehow stops disk formatting even from Fdisk, DOS or XP setup. You tend to get it from Kazaa and other popular P2P progs.

[NightWalker XI]

Yeah mine has infected my whole PC...it says to run Norton (which I don't have) in safe mode then delete or repair all tyhe files with that virus...WTS...man why the fuck do people make virus, what a bunch of wankers....

[NightWalker XI]

Oh yeah I only have one PC...meh

This is stupid, all I want is to play some games...fuckign piece of shit...if I run Norton it makes the PC run so slow I can't do anythign besides click ok to the norton repair messages...

[NightWalker XI]

Ah shit I can't get rid of it, I have tried everythign besides a format which was my last option...I would have to get ALL 5 GIGS OF MUSIC AND 10 GIGS OF ANIME BACK...THIS SUCKS...WELL THE ANIME IS ALREADY GONE DUE TO AN ACCIDENTAL DELETION BUT IT WILLT AKE LIKE A FULL DAY TO reinstall

(caps accidently)

[Cease]

You may want to consider splitting your drive into multiple partitions. Keep your data files(mp3s, mpegs, etc) on one drive and your operating system on the other. That way if you ever need to reinstall your operating system, your data files will be fine.

[NCG JMan]

Originally posted by Hexen
Yup, you are.

If everything fails btw, theres always the happy format. :P

LOL...that's what I was going to suggest That works for me everytime.

And a future suggestion is that if you have an extra HD around, configure it as a slave and put all your music and Anime on it. That way if you have to reformat, you want lose all those files again.

[Hexen]

Yeah thats what I do.

I've got my master drive (40gig) with OS, games and utils on it. Plus I've got a little 8 gig that has all my music, movies and stuff.

[NightWalker XI]

I guess I may buy a new HD then, I only have one 120GB HDD

[Intruder]

Well there are other ways to kill virusus but most involve at least a minimal understanding on virii.

To answer your question why people write virii, its a challenge, usually they setout to achive a task, be it to do X, Y or Z.

The thing is that 90% of virii makers dont use it maliciously, its the script kiddys that get off on making other peoples lives a living hell hole.

Back to the issue of your HD, have you any friends who own computers? its not hard to install a Hd into another computer. Of course make sure they know what they are doing otherwise they will get infected...

[IDgaf]

Off-topic, but apparently 'virus' doesn't have a plural.

Didn't know myself until recently. Need to find time to read this link:

http://www.perl.com/language/misc/virus.html

[Aegis]

This virus will affect various OSs, resists formatting in most cases and will infect every HD or partition on your PC if you dont catch it quick, it is a fairly malicious one despite the Norton description saying its not. It doesnt delete everything just clogs up your system until nothing works and resists anything you do to get rid of it.

[NCG JMan]

If you do a "hard" format on your HD, you should wipe it completely clean. I can only see a virus being that tenacious if you have only did a "quick" format. I believe the quick format keeps some of the formating (sectors etc...) but just deletes the data. As for a "hard" reformat you completely wipe the HD clean...no sectors etc.... If I am wrong, sorry for the misinformation (and correct me please), but this is what I have learned. Just reformat. It will probably save you time in the long run. It's quick now (if you are running XP). Good luck.

[1024]

Restart your computer. That always works for me.

[NCG JMan]

Originally posted by 1024
Restart your computer. That always works for me.

Restarting your computer when you have a sector virus on your computer always works for you....lucky you then

[NightWalker XI]

Yeah I'm gonna format in two weeks when I'm back from holiday.....I can't believe I'm loosing all my stuff...ho well....in a few months I'll have it all back