Unknown boot message

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8-bit
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Joined: Wed 04 Apr 2007, 03:37
Location: Oregon

Unknown boot message

#1 Post by 8-bit »

After booting and running from a Puppy live CD with no problems, I decided to again boot from Puppy on the hard drive.
When I went to boot Puppy 5.11, I momentarily saw something with the words Data Shield flash on the screen and disappear.
I have not installed any files I know of that would associate with that.
So my question is where did that momentary message come from?

Should I do a backup of my pupsave files and a complete wipe of both hard drives using dban and then do a reinstall using burnt CDs of the puppy OSes I want to use.

I think my problems are not associated with failing hard drives,
I did comprehensive checks of the drives and they appear to be good.
But for a message to suddenly show that has nothing to do with my installed files, I am trying to sort this out.

Also, I previously did a complete factory reinstall of Vista from the recovery partition that supposedly formatted the drive. But the format seemed to be too fast and I assume it was a quick format done by the Vista recovery install.
I have read that some viruses will survive a format of the hard drive and so that is part of the reason for using Dban to do a wipe of the drives and then go from there.

I have nothing personal on the drives that I would not share with anyone other than stored passwords in Seamonkey.
But I sure would not want to infect someone elses computer and that is part of the reason I want to sort this out.

One thing that has changed since just before these problems started is that I bought my wife a Nook tablet and connected it to the router aka my personal network.
Her Nook currently does not have Best Buys antivirus installed on it too.
Could her Nook have been used via internet to infect my PC?

I am still looking for answers and have looked on the net for datashield to see what it is.

It seems to also be used on some CDs to protect content of the CDs.
But I did not investigate further.

My wife says I should go buy another PC to replace this one that is driving me crazy.
But I am stubborn and would really like to see what has caused file corruption of both Windows Vista partition and Puppy partitions.
I already am to the point of knowing I have to reinstall everything on a clean drive since I have now had a number of areas of the drives show up in saved data files made by chkdsk on Windows Vista and similar problems with my ext2 partitions.
The ext2 partitions were unmounted before running ex2fsck on them.

So.....
1. Should I trash the desktop PC for another assuming hardware problems?
2. Try the drives on another PC doing a complete install on the other computer?
3. Stop posting about my troubles and ask for no further help?
4. Start a botnet to pass along my problems to all Puppy and Windows PCs? ;-)
Sorry about the last one, I am just truly frustrated!

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Ted Dog
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#2 Post by Ted Dog »

Is harddrive acting funny did you try different hd in unit. sounds like it could be a corruption problem on harddrive. does it require two boots to work? halts first boot but works on second. There are bios protection methods that store critical boot parms from HD and compare those each boot ( drive shield may be bios ) one machine I have does this when swapping HD or if HD got corrupted.

Sylvander
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Joined: Mon 15 Dec 2008, 11:06
Location: West Lothian, Scotland, UK

Re: Unknown boot message

#3 Post by Sylvander »

1.
8-bit wrote:I have now had a number of areas of the drives show up in saved data files made by chkdsk on Windows Vista and similar problems with my ext2 partitions.
The ext2 partitions were unmounted before running ex2fsck on them.
a. Do you think those are the files that Windows creates when it recovers "orphan file fragments"?
If so, that would explain why the OS's are messed up and not functioning normally.
Do you have any [Image?] backups you can restore?

2.
8-bit wrote:The ext2 partitions were unmounted before running ex2fsck on them.
ext2 PFS's do NOT recover well when you use a scan&fix [because they are NOT "journal file systems" like ext3, ext4, NTFS are, which auto-backup the PFS, and restore in uncorrupted form by a check&fix]

3.
8-bit wrote:Should I trash the desktop PC for another assuming hardware problems?
I don't think so; I wouldn't.
You need to recover good PFS's and OS folder/file systems.

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technosaurus
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#4 Post by technosaurus »

data shield is a lenovo preinstalled feature iirc

if you want to totally abandon windows and wipe everything:

dd -if=/dev/zero -of=/dev/sdX

where X is normally a (sda not sda1)
Check out my [url=https://github.com/technosaurus]github repositories[/url]. I may eventually get around to updating my [url=http://bashismal.blogspot.com]blogspot[/url].

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Ted Dog
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Location: Heart of Texas

#5 Post by Ted Dog »

technosaurus wrote:data shield is a lenovo preinstalled feature iirc

if you want to totally abandon windows and wipe everything:

dd -if=/dev/zero -of=/dev/sdX

where X is normally a (sda not sda1)
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M
is generally faster. either way about 100G per hour to wipe.

Also if seagate they have a bootible cd image that also checks for bad blocks as it wipes Harddrive.

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Barkin
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Re: Unknown boot message

#6 Post by Barkin »

8-bit wrote:... would really like to see what has caused file corruption of both Windows Vista partition and Puppy partitions ...
There can be other hidden* partitions on the hard-drive: my Dell laptop came with one with which has a mediaplayer which runs without any OS being installed. Your "data shield" could be something similar , a legitimate factory-installed stand-alone program on a hidden partition which can run on its own without the assistance of any OS , rather than malware which can infect both Windows and Linux.


[ * the hidden partitions on the hard-drive are by default hidden in Windows OS, but are always visible via Puppy Linux ]

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8-bit
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Location: Oregon

#7 Post by 8-bit »

First, I am finally booting and using Quirky 6 from a 4gig USB flash drive.
I finally got syslinux installer to work!

Sylvander, Those files are definitely orphaned segments from the Western Digital drive that contains the windows Vista install and the recovery partition.
So far, I have not seen any orphaned files on the Maxtor drive that has 2 ext2 partitions with frugal Puppy linux installs.
I have the PC set with the Maxtor drive as the boot drive with grub for dos installed on it.
I did not install grub on the Western Digital drive.

technosaurus,
As to wiping the windows drive I would do a reinstall on it using the recovery CDs I created when I got the desktop.
I have a number of games that will not run with wine and do not want the ability to play them.
And thank you for the linux wipe command.

Ted Dog,
Sometimes in Windows Vista boot, I get to the desktop and other times I get a blue screen crash dump before the desktop appears.
Also, I have had the keybord and mouse lock up and everything come to a halt. And that was after doing a factory recover on the drive!
I ran checkdisk from Windows immediately after the factory restore and still had problems.

All:
Is there a utility I can use outside of booting windows to check the drive for problems?
Preferably, it would be one I could boot from to check the drive for problems.
This goes for both the Western Digital drive and the Maxtor drive and I have CDs for both the Maxtor and Western Digital drives.
I have not explored either one to see if they have disk checking utilities on them.
I will try to keep you informed. I have a lot of stuff Puppy related that I do not want to loose.
The windows stuff I would just reinstall from the install CDs after being assured the drives were not going bad.

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greengeek
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#8 Post by greengeek »

Would it be possible to physically remove the WD drive and run only with the Maxtor installed? Just running puppy for a while with only the Maxtor might give you a feeling for how much of the system is reliable.

Sylvander
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Joined: Mon 15 Dec 2008, 11:06
Location: West Lothian, Scotland, UK

#9 Post by Sylvander »

8-bit wrote:All:
Is there a utility I can use outside of booting windows to check the drive for problems?
Preferably, it would be one I could boot from to check the drive for problems.
What kind of problems did you want to check?
1. I only ever:
a. Scan&fix the PFS using:
a1. Puppy->GParted->choose drive and partition->"check".
Or...
a2. FalconFour's UBCD->MiniXP->"Disk Check".
This scan&fix of the PFS is pretty certain to produce a fix with no problems provided the PFS is a "Journalling" filesystem [ext3, ext4, NTFS].
I never use ext2 filesystems these days; I always use something better [ext3, ext4].

b. If that doesn't produce a total fix, I restore:
b1. A folder/file backup [using Puppy->Xfe] to a fixed PFS.
Or...
b2. An image backup made and restored using "Acronis True Image".
Can't remember the last time I was forced to do this, it's so long ago.

2. Once upon a time...
My son had his HDD start to develop faulty clusters.
I used ddrescue to clone the faulty HDD to a new/good HDD of equal or greater size.
See: Anyone know how to use ddrescue [NOT dd_rescue]?
This operation recoved all-but-1-file from the old to the new.
The operation of ddrescue was very impressive. :D
Simple to use once I figured how, and acceptably fast.
I tried and couldn't find any way to fix the faulty HDD, so I used a sledgehammer to destroy it.

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