Sit down, kiddies, lemme tell ya a story.
New hardware arrived yesterday. My plan, as some of you know, was to have the basics of a new box built for me - mboard, vid card, hard drive and OS. Then I was going to slowly put the pieces of my old computer back in.
Step 1 - get the new computer onto the internet, this way I could access tech help and drivers as I needed it. Step 1 worked fine. Put in some stuff for net connections, bam - there was google.com.
Step 2 - put the old HD in. This was the big one, it had all my old work/code on it. I had to swap it to be the secondary and had an awful scare when I found an empty UT2003 folder, but then I realized where there right partition was and bam, data saved.
Step 3 - install old CDRom drive, so that I could get software on the beast. No problem. Bing bam, CDROM.
Step 4 - install Radeon 9700. This would complete the box and turn it into one hell of a rig. No problems. The card I had them put in was also an ATI, so the drivers just woke up to the new card.
Seemingly victorious, I danced around for a bit and then proceeded to download various programs like Mozilla and Winamp, etc.
Then disaster.
Windows froze.
Hard Drive failed. Disk Read Error.
Computer gone. For well over an hour I swapped drives, fumbled cables, tried one tiny change or another - but I seemed trapped between the new HD having a disk read error, my old hard drive being lost in the new board and throwing a blue screen, and the CDROM refusing to be boot.
Feeling defeated, I emailed the guys who put it together and almost went to bed (about 1AM now). Just for kicks, I poked around a bit on google to see what others had done.
Took me a bit, but I got the BIOS to boot the CDROM first, put my old HD in as primary (the new one wasn't even seen by the BIOS now) and put the XP install disk. Repair, repair, install, install. Thank GOD Sony decided to partition that old computer, because I could do all this knowing my lovely code was relatively safe on the second half.
Over an hour later, Windows XP booted up. Then I had to teach my old OS (after having to call Microsoft to explain to them why I was now re-activating the same XP CD again ... I had forgot they added this - it really, really sucks) to see the motherboard's ethernet card and the new sound card (an SB Audigy - dang, I'll never go back to onboard sound again).
After pushing the Far Cry demo around for a bit, I set up the UT2004 demo to download and went to bed. Time of now seeming victory: 4AM.
In the morning, the computer had restarted itself.
I tried to redownload the demo, it told me the RPC service had died and it was going to restart itself anyway.
Yup that's right.
After all that. I have a virus. A little research and my guess is that I've had this virus since about November, but my firewall kept it from doing any harm. When the OS repaired, Tiny reset it's setup, I accidentally permitted some bizarre request and it awoke.
So after many hours of labor - I have a new computer, an old virus and an 80GB paperweight.
Thankfully Microsoft has reissued an update, and I can teach Tiny how to kill Blaster again while I fix it. Should be OK by this weekend. The paperweight's fate is unknown.
