I guess I got the lsass.exe virus, Help Please!

[rabidsheeep]

What a way to end the year...

I woke up this morning and went through the casual things I do, go online, go to a few forum websites, nothing out of the ordinary, no downloads or explicit websites.

A few minutes after turning on my computer the keyboard and mouse seem to stop getting power. Not a huge issue, just gotta restart, so I held down the power button etc. etc.

It restarted and came up blank.
Then restarted again and gave me a bios screen offering me to load default configurations, hit F2 and did that
Then restarted and gave me System Error lsass.exe Object name not found

I googled it quickly and found out that the Lsass.exe is something windows uses for logins, but when the L is replaced by a lower case l or i it is a virus. Mine is indeed a lower case l.

So I am lost. I cant boot, at all. Theres no way for me to run anti viruses. I have video files worth my life not backed up (I know, I know) on that hardrive, not to mention website templates, layouts, and gigs of otherthings.

Please, anyone that can help respond.

I should add that I'm running windows xp home sp1

[glc]

Remove the drive and install it in another computer as an additional drive or use a USB adapter. Scan it for viruses, then you can copy off the files you need.

WHY do you not have SP2?

[toomyg]

Mine is lower case also and mine runs fine
http://www.neuber.com/taskmanager/pr...lsass.exe.html

I found this forum that points to a virus cleaner if indeed you have a virus
http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic34160.html

[rabidsheeep]

Originally Posted by glc WHY do you not have SP2?

Bad habit of mine. Had some rough experiences with updates and anti virus programs. Spent 3 years untouched and now its biting me in the butt.

If I do take out the hardrive, and put it into another that is running sp2 with norton, are any of the files going to be lost or corrupt?

I will gladly reformat the computer, I just need to back up some really important things.

The other solution I've gotten from researching is to use a knoppix live cd

http://www.knoppix.org/

I have a laptop running ubuntu so I'm not too worried about linux, but will any of the files be corrupted because of this? Will the hardrive be automatically recognized, and say if I got an external to back up files would that be recognized too?

Thanks for the replies guys, I'm sorta twitchy nervous here.

[glc]

If I do take out the hardrive, and put it into another that is running sp2 with norton, are any of the files going to be lost or corrupt?

That's your best shot to clean it and recover your files. I wouldn't go to the extreme of involving Linux.

[rabidsheeep]

Is there any damage that could be done to my dads computer? When I go to bios I should keep his computer as the first boot device of course...

Err, will the differentiating service packs cause a problem?

[toomyg]

I feel sorry for ya I lost alot of files about 2-3 gb of familey video and pictures acouple years ago thats then I bought a second hard drive 120 gb and I use a program called Acronis True Image for my system. When everything is said and done and your pc is up and running I would look into a second HardDrive and download the Acronis True Image program version 7.It is free you can go here to sign up for it http://www.acronis.com/mag/vnu-ati7
Then to download it You have to log into your newly created account and go into your registered packages for the file
I know this don't fix you problem on hand but this sure will help in the future

[rabidsheeep]

Well, as an update, my dad won't let me use his computer so I guess I'm going the linux live cd route. I'm going to try knoppix, and if that doesn't work i'll see if I can try ubuntu.

I have a 160gig external which should hold all my stuff.

I'm somewhat worried about media formats being changed when using the live cd, because of some small incompatabilities with linux and windows but I guess I have no other choice.

Thanks for the advice guys and I'll be back to post the outcome.

[telegramsam]

The Live CD won't do anything for you, it bypasses the drive entirely.

You might consider buying another hard drive and another copy of Windows WITH SP2, and set up a new drive. Copy your files if you still can, then zero fill that drive.

Backups!
Now you'll have a second disk you can convert to an external drive so that you can create backups of things that are worth your life.

And ALWAYS run virus protection. There is no defensible argument against running real time virus scanners. AVG is free and works very well.