Solved! virus on drive or just bad drive?

[luckydriver]

I have a perplexing problem. I noticed on Friday that my Norton icon was not in my tray and it was not running. I could not make it run unless I was in safe mode. It appeared to be okay and safe mode. I tried Norton tools to remove it and reinstall it and basically what I get is a computer that hangs all the time. Even after you reboot after it says it is removed you have to reboot it again and again and it's a pointless Circle. I tried an entire day of just rebooting and trying to reinstall it. Also I tried to boot into safe mode when Network support so I can reinstall it in safe mode but I could not figure out how to get internet while in safe mode. I tried doing a ScanDisk and it said it could not repair and recommended the other troubleshooting to repair windows but that did not work. The strange thing is that things like Firefox and chrome work perfectly but I cannot do something like open a PDF. I tried installing McAfee and it asked to uninstall Norton and I believe Norton did get uninstalled but then McAfee would not install all the way and it was over 30 minutes and nothing should take 30 minutes to install. I tried doing an online scan with another virus scanner and it did not work. Is it possible it's just a hard drive and putting an image on from a couple days ago would do the trick. I hate to start from scratch because of all the programs on the computer. also another symptom is when i go to restart it hang on restart forever ..so i just kill it manually and it restarts just find.

one other weird thing is when i try to go to safe mode sometimes. gives me BSOD and i have to reimage

its an asus machine running 8.1 and new SSD drive about 3 to 4 years ago.

i was thinking of restoring an image from a few days ago on a spare HDD i have laying around. i guess that would tell me something.that rules in or out the SSD?

edit. reinstalled windows. all programs still there, as well as norton not installing. but windows update says never run and it did take 90 min to install windows. so it had to have reinstalled. i guess..ugh. yet i cannot even open PDFs. firefox chrome. excel etc all work fine.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you re-installed Windows the programs should not be there. You must have done a restore or a reset which is not the same are re-installing it. See if you can install Malwarebytes and run that. What exactly happens when you try to open PDF files?

 

[luckydriver]

malwarebytes runs scans fine. only thing is the ransom button cannot be turned on. just in past week i began getting notices that it needed to be turned on but no matter what i cannot turn it on. but i can always run this program and have scanned many times in the past 2 days. just a normal PUP that has kept appearing for the past year.

i click on PDF and it doesnt do a thing. i tried to reinstall from adobe but it says i have a newer version already installed, which is weird.

so now i guess my problem is how do i get the ISO to boot from my usb drive. even when i tried doing a repair or install from the USB drive while windows was booted it said its the wrong media. however i know the ISO is good because i ran it from the E drive while in windows to refresh the system.

so the key here is how to format the SSD via some kind of program on the USB stick and get the ISO to install from the USB drive. but i dont know how to do that obviously

 

[hang-the-9]

Use the Windows 10 media creation utility from Microsoft on another USB drive to make the Windows setup media. Note your Windows code and you should be able to use it with 10.