Well I solved it, quite a simple solution.
I ghost'ed the entire drive to another drive, removed all the partitions from the original drive, did a "clean disk" in DISKPART, recreated a small blank partition to force a new partition table, and then Ghost'ed back all the partitions.
All works like a charm, all my Dell system/restore partitions are intact and everything works fine now.
Must be a bug (or virus) that got into the partition table or MBR of the drive.
Rick
There's a rootkit that's been doing the rounds since December that shows itself through blue screens with a IRQ not less or equal stop code. Usually blaming the iastor.sys driver as the cause.Must be a bug (or virus) that got into the partition table or MBR of the drive.
It starts by blue screening/freezing on random programs, then when booting to Normal Mode, then when you try to boot to Safe Mode. Eventually it will allow no access whatsoever.
If this sounds familiar, Download TDSSKiller and run it in Safe Mode. Just to rule out the rootkit.
As long as you can keep Safe Mode open for 30 seconds or so it should be enough to run TDSSKiller and remove it.
Ok, I'm a tech who just got a customer with this issue, machine is a Toshiba Satellite L655.
The laptop started to show the exact symptons, iastor.sys causing a stop error (BSOD), even in safe mode. I tried updating all the relevant drivers but this didn't help.
I even restored back to factory settings after backing up, I was able to restore the machine until the Toshiba apps began installing and bam, BSOD - same issue. Weird??
So anyway, I managed to get Safe mode with networking for 5 minutes and decided to run TDDSKiller.exe just to be on the safe side and bingo. Machine had a rootkit that survived a restore. Was this on the HDD before hand? Did Comodo fail to pick it up for that reason? Who knows...
But hey, thanks, TDDSKiller was then run on everything I had just for safe measure!!
Cheers
I take it I'll not be on a commission?But hey, the thanks is enough! Good idea to run it on everything as well. I do a regular run of it, mainly as I'm looking at other peoples dump files and you never really know what might be unintentionally attached to the files. So far Mbam n ESET have kept me sweet. But one day.....
I've been working on a relative's computer exhibiting the same symptoms listed on this thread and I must admit I was very skeptical about it being a bootkit. While I knew the computer would certainly have malware on it, my feeling that was that the BSOD cycle was due to a bad driver, and then perhaps a problem with the hard drive (I had been restoring windows 7 from a restore partition).
Well I was never able to boot to Windows normally nor in Safe Mode, but was able to get to Safe Mode with CMD prompt. I saved TDSSKILLER to a usb flash drive via another computer, navigated to it from the CMD prompt and was able to run it and detect the virus. After rebooting, Windows now loads up once again.
Another symptom others should look for that I haven't seen mentioned is thaat the Vendor name listed for the hard drive in the BIOS was a garbled mix of characters, but after running TDSSKILLER it now correctly shows it's Western Digital model number.
This computer is a Gateway SX2800, but frankly this problem could appear on any make or model. There is however a specific bug with BSOD mentioning iastor.sys with certain DELLs after reinstalling from a Windows 7 restore partition, so if anyone reading this is in that situation then I recommend you add 'DELL' to your searching. For everyone else, try the TDSSKILLER suggestion!
A friend’s Dell Win 7 Home 64-bit PC, initially would access safe mode and the CMD but as Fimble so warns, now there is no access at all. PC consistently reboots itself in endless cycle.
In effort to rule out the rootkit issue, booted the PC utilizing a Win7 Pro 64 bit DVD adjacent a USB Flash Drive with TDSSKiller on it. After accessing “Startup Repair” and the CMD and running the TDSSKiller.exe file, I get this error message “the subsystem needed to support the image type is not present.”
Help… please!
Same problem, Dell was really nice and replaced the hard drive, but problem persisted. The laptop had an mSATA drive and it wasn't until I turned off RAID for that drive (which effectively reformatted it?) that the problem went away. A virus or corruption in there perhaps? TDSSKiller didn't find anything.
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