restore

[NeWbiE :-)]

my HP PC comes with a system restore program that with the ammounts of spyware around the web these days the restore has become a regular thing for my pc but lately it seems when i do the system restore when my pc reboots my local drive doesnt work? this is now my 3rd cd-rw drive that has gone bad and i ran out of spares around the house when i buy my next one is there anyway to do the restore without ruining the drive?...or could i possibly do anything to the drives to fix them? possibly just reconnect?...thanks for any advise

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Losing or ruining your drive when doing a restore sounds awful odd to me.

Have you tried removing the drive in Safe Mode from Device Manager, then rebooting into regular? It may disorient your burner program but that could be reinstalled afterwards.

Does the drive show up in setup?

[kirbykirbykirby]

are you sure it screws up?, maybe the spyware/adware only inflicts the windows driver for that drive while on that computer, Have you tried adding it to another computer and seeing if it works from there? if it dosent them maybe the spyware could have infected the firmware of the drive? Sorry if this dosent make much sense.

[Paleo Pete]

Hmmm...say, is your name KIRBY?? :D

Checking it on another computer would be a good idea, at least to see if it acts strange and if it would still read a CD. Full functionality testing would involve installing the burner software on that computer, but that probably wouldn't be necessary. If it will read it will probably write, if it shows up and stays put that would indicate a software problem, not hardware.

I suppose it's possible that spyware or other malware could have infected the driver, but I think it's more likely something like installing software with antivirus still active or similar corrupted the driver. You're still on the right track anyway...

I doubt if anything could affect the firmware of the drive, from what I understand that is stored on a non-volatile ROM chip, can't be changed and therefore should be immune to that kind of thing.

Don't mean to seem like I'm shooting down all your ideas, I'm not. Part of it is good, part of it misinformed, so I thought it best to try and correct what I can and add to it as well, then you're more informed too. (And I may be wrong about the firmware chip, if so someone will certainly correct me.) So don't take it the wrong way, nobody is starting off down on you.

[NeWbiE :-)]

well the most recent drive is fine it was just a bad disk and the other 2 be4 are gone so i only have one infected drive by what ever it may be so ill try that one in a seperate computer and ill get back to u thanks for the help

[saphalline]

(And I may be wrong about the firmware chip, if so someone will certainly correct me.)
For a lot of optical burners, firmware chips are indeed upgradable. They usually use some type of EEPROM chip(s) to store the firmware. Sometimes it adds functionality or fixes problems with certain media to update your burner's firmware. However, each manufacturer probably has their own way of implementing the drive's firmware, and therefore slightly different methods of storing the firmware on the chip(s), and different methods of gaining access to the flashing of new data onto the chip(s).

If someone could reverse-engineer this process, they could theoretically devise a virus to screw up your burner's firmware. This is highly, highly unlikely for 2 reasons: 1) if someone wanted to write a virus for your burner's firmware, they'd probably just render the thing totally non-operational rather than just make it "flaky", and 2) it doesn't make much sense to spend that much time creating a virus that would only affect users of that particular line of optical burners who happened to also not run AV software!

Now again, it's technically possible to create such a virus, but why? It's such a pointless endeavor that not even the strange sense of satisfaction that comes from completing such a goal would be worth it to any hacker with any common sense. It's akin to sitting down and manually typing a Word document that exceeds the NT kernel's file size capacity of 4GB. :rolleyes: There's just no point...