So I had a Windows melt down yesterday. I powered up my work computer in the morning and Windows didn’t boot anymore. Instead, it showed this message:

When I clicked OK, the computer rebooted. I thought that maybe my hard drive is has corrupted some files so I ran SpinRite. First I ran it in recovery mode (2) and there was one unrecoverable block. Other than that, everything seemed fine. I rebooted the computer and the error was still there.

So I booted UBCD4Win and made backups of all files. Also I checked that the system files are in place and everything looked fine. It’s possible that this type of error is caused by Sasser or other worm but I don’t think that was the case. Or maybe it was, who knows. I don’t run any anti-virus software actively but I do have pretty thick firewall. Maybe once in a month I’ll do a scan of viruses and spyware. I have had only one virus back in windows 95 days but it doesn’t mean that a malicious software couldn’t get into the system from some unknown hole.

Anyway, I decided to reinstall Windows just to be sure. If it was a virus then the system was already compromised. Also it has been pretty long time since last install and things started to be a bit messy. Unfortunately I had to use the same hard drive (no money to buy new) . I did analyze it with SpinRite and everything looked to be OK, hopefully it stays that way.