eeeeeeeevil malware

and hard drive. Or something.

I spent nine hours last night trying to kill off cmdService on my
neighbours' pc. I tried everything. It was horrible. Finally,
around 2am, I killed the little bugger. Then I found something
called Spysomething or other installed on the computer and figured it
was one of those tricksy ones that pretended to be a helpful thing
when it was really not. Since it hadn't registered in Spybot or
Adaware, I thought, eh, let's just uninstall via windows
uninstaller. Big mistake. It stalled midway. I rebooted and
whammo, now I'm getting the eternal loop - regardless of which boot
option I choose.

That includes Safe Mode with command prompt!!

I tried booting off another XP disc and was able to enter recovery
console, but now I cannot get into the C: drive. It won't let me log
in. I was able to chkdsk it and was informed at 34% that there are
unrecoverable errors on the drive.

So I thought, well, maybe the hard drive is on its way out... let's
find out if I can recover ANYthing on this thing. I borrowed Dale's
external hard drive enclosure only to find out that the iMac doesn't
read NTFS drives. It can see it, but I can't access the contents.
So much for that idea. I was about to stuff the drive in Raven (my
xp box) but then Dale reminded me about Parallels. Sure enough,
Parallels WILL see the drive... however, maybe because I neglected to
pull the "master" jumper off the drive, XP in Parallels is painfully
slow since seeing E:. And, I've yet to actually peek into the drive
to see if I can see anything anyway.

Okay, currently shutting off the drive... and reseated as slave. So
far so slow... but you never know. It might be the interface or the
drive for all I know. If this doesn't work within reason, I'll try
Raven after all...

Sigh...

And, I'm starving, but I don't want pancakes. I actually have no
idea what I want. I think my stomach is simply irritated with the
stress of this evil incarnate of a computer. I need to get out of
this business. I wonder what'll happen when I attempt to do a
"simple" restore of a client pc later today...

~whit