Sep 12, 2018
2
0
10
Hey Everyone,
Yesterday I started getting a strange self opening tab on my Chrome browser. It would begin to go to a random site then be redirected to theragnarokarena(dot)com. With a little research I learned that this can be pretty nasty. At first it was an annoying popup in Chrome, but within about 3 hours it started affecting everything. My boot times are insanely long, I randomly lose the ability to click on any given app that's open, and worst of all I can't seem to track down any program that could be causing this. I scanned with Defender and it found nothing, I looked through Apps & Features to delete it, nothing. I figured I would try to move all my personal files over to an external hard drive, I plugged the drive in and deleted what was on there to make room for everything, but now it doesn't show up anywhere, so I have nowhere to move my files. At that point I was down to resetting (while keeping personal files) or reverting to previous build. This is where it really started to scare me. When attempting to do either of these things (I've done it before on this machine with no problems) I would get a message saying that the PC ran into a problem and was not able to do what I wanted and no changes were made. I don't really mind losing programs, those can all be reinstalled, but I'd really like to not lose any personal files. I was thinking on unplugging all my HDDs that have personal files and attempting to do the reset that wipes all files but not too sure if that will help anything. I also worry that attempting that reset will give me the same error and not actually reset anything. Maybe I can revert to factory settings via BIOS, or installing a 3rd party anti-virus may have for luck than Defender? I'm in uncharted waters here now, any help is greatly appreciated!
 
Solution
Boot off a Linux Live disk, copy your files to an external backup drive, including your bookmarks, email files. Just make sure you don't copy downloads or anything you know you did not create. Scan that drive with an anti-virus utility that the Linux Live disk should have.

Reset the system using the factory reset to new, install your programs again and copy files back from the backup.
Boot off a Linux Live disk, copy your files to an external backup drive, including your bookmarks, email files. Just make sure you don't copy downloads or anything you know you did not create. Scan that drive with an anti-virus utility that the Linux Live disk should have.

Reset the system using the factory reset to new, install your programs again and copy files back from the backup.
 
Solution

Mustangace

Commendable
Nov 5, 2016
13
0
1,570


I would first download Malwarebytes here: https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/

...and run it. Chances are it will find some nasty stuff on your computer, as you are probably one of those to click on almost everything. If not, I apologize for that comment but so many innocently unaware humans do just that. Anyway, Malwarebytes can be a Godsend in catching and correcting this kind of crap. Give it a try. It might solve your problem.