A tale of auto-updates, vanishing data and "what the hell happened"...
A friend called me a few weeks ago after a Windows auto-update crashed her computer; unbeknownst to me, the admin password had been changed from what I set it to, nobody knew what it was and so I had to talk her through resetting it (which I managed to do successfully) and do a system restore to a point before the update. Not knowing precisely what happened, I walked her through disabling auto-updates until I would be able to get a look at things.
Tonight, she applied an "update" that somehow wiped the hard drive
She says (and of course I'm 100 miles away so have no way to verify it for myself) that everything was deleted. I can't get my hands on the hard drive myself to investigate as she's taken it to a local person (I had no idea there was a repair shop in her neck of the woods). I'm suspecting a virus if the result reporting is accurate, but how could a virus get into the update server (and if it wasn't a virus, could a Windows update hose things that badly)? Adding to the shakiness of an update being the culprit is that her computer has the same OS as my mom's desktop, and I've updated her computer with no issues. I suspect something was fiddled with that shouldn't have been (but what and how?).
Holy crap. I get back from vacation to find out about that...well, at least all the computers I'm directly responsible for are still running.
A friend called me a few weeks ago after a Windows auto-update crashed her computer; unbeknownst to me, the admin password had been changed from what I set it to, nobody knew what it was and so I had to talk her through resetting it (which I managed to do successfully) and do a system restore to a point before the update. Not knowing precisely what happened, I walked her through disabling auto-updates until I would be able to get a look at things.
Tonight, she applied an "update" that somehow wiped the hard drive
She says (and of course I'm 100 miles away so have no way to verify it for myself) that everything was deleted. I can't get my hands on the hard drive myself to investigate as she's taken it to a local person (I had no idea there was a repair shop in her neck of the woods). I'm suspecting a virus if the result reporting is accurate, but how could a virus get into the update server (and if it wasn't a virus, could a Windows update hose things that badly)? Adding to the shakiness of an update being the culprit is that her computer has the same OS as my mom's desktop, and I've updated her computer with no issues. I suspect something was fiddled with that shouldn't have been (but what and how?).
Holy crap. I get back from vacation to find out about that...well, at least all the computers I'm directly responsible for are still running.
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