I feel like I am riding a tiger

I posted this earlier at the Toshiba forum, but from what I've seen no one is wanting to answer too much on anything over there. Vista Forums seem to have a lot of quality people helping others, so here goes....

08-23-2009 03:06 AM
I am working on an A300-1J1 (French Keyboard & Vista 32). The machine is owned by a member of my family, and when I got it it was totally down due to virus contamination. I started out getting the system virus free and by using Bit Defender, Avira Rescue and Trinity Rescue Disk, I managed to get it to the point where I was not finding any malware, but still couldn't boot due to files being trashed by the various malware that had been picked up. The machine was so hard down that it would BSOD almost contiously on a boot or would hang in the welcome screen. I removed the hard drive and put it in a USB Sata external unit and then did a Avira check and it told me that the unit was clean, I then did a chkdsk /f /r and had 5 files that had been damaged and were repaired. I then did a defrag and re installed the drive and it boots fine, but i cannot seem to use any of my USb flash drives or my USB sata eternal units on it. It keeps trying to install USB Controllers and Intel USB Devices, but it tells me that when I plug in a USB flash drive or a Sata drive that it doesn't recognize the peripheral..... I am running another AV check on the unit now and am going to probably pull the drive and move all the data to my 400 gig unit on my laptop and then try to burn a set of recovery disks and possibly get this unit back in shape.... My biggest problem is doing the various steps in French.... Along with typing on a French keybd... I am positive that the problem is not in the hardware as all the USB ports were working normally when they infected the machine and caused it to crash repeatedly... At present I have a USB Targus Mouse plugged into one of the USB ports (left side next to the cat5 port, and it is working, but the one I have a Kingston 16 gig DataTraveler G2 plugged in, refused to recognize the Flash Drive and told me that the driver was not available for the unrecognized peripheral....
I have been working on the machine for 4 days, but again I am doing it for family and I am retired here in French Polynesia, and am rather stubborn.... I will let you know what I find out, but for sure I know that the problem is NOT hardware.....

More laters....


At present, I am thinking seriously of moving the hard drive back to a USB Sata external box and then dropping all the data on another sata drives for back up.
I will try to download the recovery DVD section if possible, and if not I am going to have to contact a dealer for a set of Recovery DVD's for this model, I am not at the end of the world here, I'm over it! BTW, the mouse is no longer working either. I believe that it is the USB Drivers in Vista, as everything works on my Toshiba Laptop which is a Satellite A365D-S6930. The A300 on boot keeps trying to load the USB controllers over and over and even though they are there, they aren't seeing anything that gets plugged in at present, if I clear them and re boot, then plug in the Targus wireless mouse it will work for a period of time then quits and doesn't get recognized again.... I am quickly running out of ideas, and being on a small island in the south pacific isn't doing my morale much good either <grin> Sure would be nice to talk to another tech on Skype over this can of worms........

It sounds like it would have been easier to clean install Vista, no? Nonetheless, I like your spirit. If you're missing discs, by the way, the Vista Anytime Upgrade disc can be used to clean install (there is a torrent for it, I suggest backing up the activation key first), and recovery discs can be downloaded quite easily (Google should point you in the right direction, I don't believe they are different for different models/manufacturers).

Here's what I found on fixing problematic USB drivers in Vista. Basically, the file responsible for locating the drivers is corrupt. You need to delete it (after applying the proper permissions) so that Vista will recreate it. Check out the link for the entire process.

Umm... Regarding the French, if I understood that it's a problem, Vista very easily switches between languages. Win+R, type intl.cpl and press enter (Control Panel>Clock, Language and Region>Regional and Language Options). Go to the Administrative tab, and click Change system locale... I believe this changes the language of Windows (restart required). Also, even though your keyboard may not show you the letters you're typing, but if you touch-type, you can easily manage the input language of the keyboard under the Keyboards and Languages tab. Having a picture of the QWERTY layout usually helps out a lot if you need to find what letters are where.

VaguelyRapt

Thank you very much for your kind and rapid reply, I greatly appreciate it, and I will try to get the language thing sorted out, I didn't realize that vista would switch back and forth easily... But again I just came home after living 15 years in Oregon taking care of my mother, and having everything in english (my native tongue) When I left here in the mid 90's computers were just being introduced and now they are everywhere and so is all the malware, etc..... I am totally used to the qwerty keyboard, and in fact all my boxes here are american but the family, my daughter and grandkids are totally French and they use the French keybds exclusively....

I would like to point you to my photo site, it will give you an idea of where I live at present and also take you on a photo journey.... If you see any photo's that you like, feel free to download them and use them.... I am not a pro, and to me the highest compliment I can receive is someone asking for one of my photos....

Mah's Photos my best gallery is "an ocean apart" which is located at the bottom of the page....

Thanks Again!

Ken Jackson
CPO USN Ret.

The easiest option would be to copy the hard drive as an image or just what you need onto an external drive. Then with a copy of the Vista DVD in the drive, reboot, delete all partitions, then re-format a new partition just for vista. Then check out the toshiba site for drivers - A300 1J1. It seems as if the malware has damaged key vista files.

If you don't want to format, open up a cmd prompt as administrator, then type sfc /scannow. See if that helps.

Thanks Frostmourne

I am already beginning to like this Vista site... I googled and came up with Vista a couple of days ago, and after reading and looking and more reading and looking, I decided to post here and from what I am experiencing here I am really pleasantly suprised.. I am going to try first to save everything and may end up having to do a format and total install, but the problem with that is Toshiba doesn't issue disks and every computer you purchase from them has its own restore disks included on the hard drive, On this machine (the one I am using to write this a (A365D) I just tried to copy the restore disks and the first one gets almost to the close and is failing, so I am not too happy with Toshiba at the moment. I bought this laptop to use while everything else is in transit here and to use while I was in the hospital in the states... I am an old Sperry Univac Field engineer (UYK7 mainframes and Navy Systems), also a retired Navy Electronics Technician Chief... I know enough to keep busy and as we usta say a long time ago in an ocean far away...... The amount of knowledge gained is equal to the cube of the equipment destroyed...... I am old and in the way, but I still learn and try to keep up altho that is getting a little more difficult as the years go by.... Here in French Polynesia, I get tagged as Mr. Fixit, and I see a lot of stuff and manage to fix a lot, but sometimes really need help with the translation of the tech terms as they don't logically match the english equivalents....

I am going to try all of the ideas that have been presented to me here and will let you all know how things work out.... I appreciate both of your help and my heartfelt thank you to you both for your time and trouble ...

In Tahitian Thank you is Maruru and I put a Roa on the end of that Maruru Roa which makes it a Big Thank You!

Here is a photo of Uturoa, my home town....

Incidentally, if you do buy a Toshiba or any laptop look for an option to create recovery discs. I created 4 in 75min as a backup the first time I booted my new laptop. As for backup, you can try Norton Ghost to back up your hard drive or a freeware program like drive image xl - www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm.

If the scannow prompt works rescan your pc with as many scanners as possible to eliminate any infection. Scan with superantispyware, malwarebytes, sophos ant-rootkit and an online scanner to be sure. Better yet, scan again the week later.