(OT) Dead HDD

I'll be a little scarce for a while due to PC trouble. If anyone wants to
contact me before I get it resolved and I don't reply online, feel free to
call. Sherry R. has my number if you don't, and it's on the friesianlover
site as well.

Here are some details of the disaster in case anyone has a suggestion to
help me get back up and running sooner.

Yesterday there was an odd noise coming from my hard drive. At first it
was intermittent, and I wasn't sure it was even coming from the computer.
Then it became constant, and a bit louder. Followed it with my ear and was
led to the front of the PC. The sound was coming from my primary HD, and
the machine didn't want to shut down. I once heard similar sound coming
from a tape player that wouldn't quit trying to advance a tape that had
reached its end.

A local geek told me the sound heralds imminent death of my HD and advised
me to hold off on trying to use it again in case it has enough time left
that he could Ghost it for me. He's not sure that will work, even if the
disk lasts long enough, because it has partitions. I don't know why having
partitions would interfere but I take his word for it and will take him
the disk soon, but I wanted to at least try to copy some data from it in
case it can't be Ghosted, so I borrowed a friend's PC which has been
sitting unused for nearly a year and has loads of unused disk space. And
now, loads of malware as well.

Just before putting her PC in mothballs, there had been a heavy
infestation of spyware that we couldn't uproot, and I had reinstalled
windows for her, and advised her to get the latest Zone Alarm, virus
definitions, spyware tools, etc. She didn't hear that and within a day had
such a mess of garbage running on the machine that it had to be wiped
clean again. This time she waited for HP to send a set of recovery disks
and used them instead of just installing windows xp, and right after doing
that, she didn't shut the machine down quick enough during a thunderstorm
and lost her modem. At which point she got disgusted and gave up.

So, since I knew I was starting with a "naked" setup, the first thing I
did was download Zone Alarm and the trial version of SpySweeper. Her NAV
subscription had of course expired but NAV was running and had email
scanning enabled. While downloading Zone Alarm (via dialup), NAV started
popping up little windows about outgoing email being scanned. But I wasn't
sending email, hadn't even thought of doing so.

Once Zone Alarm was installed and upon restarting there was alert after
alert about all kinds of strange programs wanting to run on startup and
asking for decisions. Before making any, I looked up a few of them on
Google, which led me to this:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.petch.html

After reading that I was kind of afraid to restart the machine!

I installed SpySweeper, updated it and ran a full scan, and it didn't find
any parts of this worm but did find a pile of BHOs, porn dialers and
assorted adware.

All this in less than an hour of being online unprotected, and having
visited only a few (very safe) websites!

I wasn't sure what to do next. Opened Task Manager and killed all those
unwanted processes, then hit Restart and crossed my fingers. Booted into
safe mode and ran SpySweeper again and got rid of a bunch more junk and
restarted normally, but the Task Manager now still indicates malicious
programs are active despite showing as blocked in ZA Programs Control.

I don't want to go any further with trying to clean my friend's PC, or
transfer data to it without cleaning first, unless I know more about
what's going on. If anyone's got good advice, please do tell.

Also, assuming I can proceed with the attempt to transfer some data, I was
hoping someone could post a link to a good beginner's guide to networking
two PCs (which is something I've never done, but I'm sure isn't all that
hard). There are network cards in both machines and I have a cable, but
really haven't got a clue on how to proceed. Mine has Windows 2000 and
hers has XP. Is some software require to be installed on both machines?
And mine requires a password to start up, so how do I get in via my
friend's machine?

Thanks in advance.

Here's a link to a page with all the specs of my PC, in case you need to
know something in order to give advice:

http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=22971

It's really time for a whole new PC, if I can figure a way to swing it
money-wise.

.

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