Blue House Computer Help
Active Member
- Reaction score
- 27
- Location
- Cambridge, UK
Here’s a tricky one. I have a customer with a Samsung laptop (NP3530EC) on Windows 8.1. He called me because I have done some other recent work on another computer of his, and he fell for a “Your computer is locked, call ‘Microsoft’ to unlock it on this handy phone number” type scam. He was only on the phone with the guy for a few minutes but the guy had already gotten remote access and was asking him to go to Amazon to verify his credit card details before he smelled a rat.
So he gave me this laptop, which was virused up to the eyeballs, (one of the worst I’ve seen). So we decided to back up the data with good old FABs, scan the back up with eset AV booted from a CD, nuke and pave, and restore said data.
Unfortunately, when I try and install Windows 10 or even Windows 8.1 again, it gets just past the “install now“ button and says there is a driver missing that I need to supply before it can continue. (though it doesn’t give any hint which one). Same behaviour when installing on a completely different hard drive.
I tried downloading The chipset drivers for this specific model from Samsung‘s website, and browsing to the unzipped folder, and to several subfolders, but it just can’t find the driver it’s looking for.
So, two questions.
1. Is my planned order of operations sufficient to keep the virus from spreading to the new installation?
2. Any ideas about what else to do about this unspecified driver, because I can’t get any further along.
3. He does have an intact recovery partition, but I wasn’t sure whether that would format the windows installation or just reset it, or really, if it would be sufficient for virus removal, and I suppose maybe it could be infected itself.
Oh and 4. Considering how nasty this virus was in a lot of other ways is it possible that it could have infected the BIOS somehow. And how would I detect and fix that?
Oh Sorry… that’s four questions.
The other complication is that he is really really not able to afford a replacement laptop.
Thoughts?
So he gave me this laptop, which was virused up to the eyeballs, (one of the worst I’ve seen). So we decided to back up the data with good old FABs, scan the back up with eset AV booted from a CD, nuke and pave, and restore said data.
Unfortunately, when I try and install Windows 10 or even Windows 8.1 again, it gets just past the “install now“ button and says there is a driver missing that I need to supply before it can continue. (though it doesn’t give any hint which one). Same behaviour when installing on a completely different hard drive.
I tried downloading The chipset drivers for this specific model from Samsung‘s website, and browsing to the unzipped folder, and to several subfolders, but it just can’t find the driver it’s looking for.
So, two questions.
1. Is my planned order of operations sufficient to keep the virus from spreading to the new installation?
2. Any ideas about what else to do about this unspecified driver, because I can’t get any further along.
3. He does have an intact recovery partition, but I wasn’t sure whether that would format the windows installation or just reset it, or really, if it would be sufficient for virus removal, and I suppose maybe it could be infected itself.
Oh and 4. Considering how nasty this virus was in a lot of other ways is it possible that it could have infected the BIOS somehow. And how would I detect and fix that?
Oh Sorry… that’s four questions.
The other complication is that he is really really not able to afford a replacement laptop.
Thoughts?
