Kaspersky's Rescue Disk refuses to update

My WinXP suddenly decided to mess up - failed boots, mysterious core
activity showing in my Core Temp app. (though TaskManager processes
shows no activity). Ran memory test. I booted into Win7 on the other
partition, seemed ok, did a ckdsk on the WinXp partition from there,
found errors and fixed (?) XP booted but still sludgy. So I tried to
boot up Kaspersky's Rescue CD to scan for malware. It refuses to
update. Doesn't seem to want to write the Kaspersky folder. (I have to
choose XP or Win7 and I tried trying both, but no Kaspersky folder
showed up in Win7) and the definitions update runs for a while then
says it fails and quits. I'm sure I have run this CD since I added
Win7 to my machine, and it ran ok then. Any answers?

On Fri, 02 Sep 2016 20:26:30 -0400, John B. Smith
wrote:

HD Tune says the 500gig drive my OSs resides on is down to a transfer
rate of 3 MB/sec, down from 184MB/sec on the 1 Terrabyte data drive.
Looks like that is an indication of my problem. The 500gig is using
cpu usage of 47% while the data drive uses 3.8%

My WinXP suddenly decided to mess up - failed boots, mysterious core
activity showing in my Core Temp app. (though TaskManager processes
shows no activity). Ran memory test. I booted into Win7 on the other
partition, seemed ok, did a ckdsk on the WinXp partition from there,
found errors and fixed (?) XP booted but still sludgy. So I tried to
boot up Kaspersky's Rescue CD to scan for malware. It refuses to
update. Doesn't seem to want to write the Kaspersky folder. (I have to
choose XP or Win7 and I tried trying both, but no Kaspersky folder
showed up in Win7) and the definitions update runs for a while then
says it fails and quits. I'm sure I have run this CD since I added
Win7 to my machine, and it ran ok then. Any answers?

John B. Smith wrote:
My WinXP suddenly decided to mess up - failed boots, mysterious core
activity showing in my Core Temp app. (though TaskManager processes
shows no activity). Ran memory test. I booted into Win7 on the other
partition, seemed ok, did a ckdsk on the WinXp partition from there,
found errors and fixed (?) XP booted but still sludgy. So I tried to
boot up Kaspersky's Rescue CD to scan for malware. It refuses to
update. Doesn't seem to want to write the Kaspersky folder. (I have to
choose XP or Win7 and I tried trying both, but no Kaspersky folder
showed up in Win7) and the definitions update runs for a while then
says it fails and quits. I'm sure I have run this CD since I added
Win7 to my machine, and it ran ok then. Any answers?

It has some weird algorithm for selecting what
it thinks is the OS partition.

Things it does:

1) Creates X:\Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10.0

Decides which volume it "likes" as the active one.
On a single disk, the Active flag may guide it.
When there are two disk drives and two OSes, I don't
know how it decides which disk drive to place that folder.

Updates go in there, whatever drive letter it decides
to use for X: .

On the first boot, it probably copies the definitions
it has on the CD, into the folder.

Later, it has a tedious update algorithm, and ends up
with a metric ton of small files in that folder.

2) Consults the registry files of the selected OS partition,
for MountVol info and drive letter definitions, which may
improve the visual appearance of drive letter identification
in the scan menu. Since I normally want to scan my WinXP
partition, it seems to end up as E: all the time. (Because
the machine has multiple OSes and it didn't select the WinXP
one as its "home".)

3) Uses the pagefile.sys as a loopback file system for swapping.
May also clean it out a little bit at shutdown, not sure. If
you use Linux "top", the amount of swap space defined, aligns
nicely with the size of pagefile.sys it is (ab)using. There's
no real harm in it doing this.

I don't see a particular reason it would run into a permission
problem. Maybe the volume still isn't fixed from CHKDSK ? There
is a prohibition for putting stuff under the root of OS drives,
but there should not be a problem making C:\Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10.0 .

While booted into Kaspersky, open the Linux Terminal application
provided, cd to the folder in question and "touch test.txt" as
a means to create an item in the folder, and see if that works.
Use "ls" to verify that worked. You can "rm test.txt" to remove
the fake entry.

You can also delete the contents of the folder, so that
the folder still exists but there is nothing in it, then
try again. I have cleaned out that mess more than once,
over the years, and not managed to break it.

If you download a fresh Kaspersky Rescue CD, the definitions
in the file should be no more than a week old. This will reduce
the impact of bungled updates, and you can scan without updates.
The 8092 download page has a tool for loading Kaspersky on
a USB flash, if you're tired of burning CDs and throwing
them away because of stuff like this...

http://support.kaspersky.com/8092

Just a guess,
Paul

On Sat, 03 Sep 2016 08:37:24 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Downloaded a new Kaspersky's Rescue 10. It had changed quite a lot. I
was able to LOOK at the sdb's (drives). I had thought XP was on 6, but
it's sdb1. I think if you pick XP as your chosen OS it looks at the
virus prone stuff on it anyway. It did find a virus and a little
adware. I was not very confident in it after I'd seen the xfer rates
on the 500gig drive from within XP, I thought must be hardware. But
when I booted XP the xfer rate was back to normal and things were
working again. I performed another ckdsk from Win7 and it said XP was
ok. I put HD Tune on Win7 also now, but AFTER the problem was solved.
Dunno what the 500gig xfer rate would have looked like from there
during my crisis.

I have not yet tried to Update definitions in Kasperskys yet. I just
ran with what came with the new CD.
Thanks for the help.


John B. Smith wrote:
My WinXP suddenly decided to mess up - failed boots, mysterious core
activity showing in my Core Temp app. (though TaskManager processes
shows no activity). Ran memory test. I booted into Win7 on the other
partition, seemed ok, did a ckdsk on the WinXp partition from there,
found errors and fixed (?) XP booted but still sludgy. So I tried to
boot up Kaspersky's Rescue CD to scan for malware. It refuses to
update. Doesn't seem to want to write the Kaspersky folder. (I have to
choose XP or Win7 and I tried trying both, but no Kaspersky folder
showed up in Win7) and the definitions update runs for a while then
says it fails and quits. I'm sure I have run this CD since I added
Win7 to my machine, and it ran ok then. Any answers?

It has some weird algorithm for selecting what
it thinks is the OS partition.

Things it does:

1) Creates X:\Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10.0

Decides which volume it "likes" as the active one.
On a single disk, the Active flag may guide it.
When there are two disk drives and two OSes, I don't
know how it decides which disk drive to place that folder.

Updates go in there, whatever drive letter it decides
to use for X: .

On the first boot, it probably copies the definitions
it has on the CD, into the folder.

Later, it has a tedious update algorithm, and ends up
with a metric ton of small files in that folder.

2) Consults the registry files of the selected OS partition,
for MountVol info and drive letter definitions, which may
improve the visual appearance of drive letter identification
in the scan menu. Since I normally want to scan my WinXP
partition, it seems to end up as E: all the time. (Because
the machine has multiple OSes and it didn't select the WinXP
one as its "home".)

3) Uses the pagefile.sys as a loopback file system for swapping.
May also clean it out a little bit at shutdown, not sure. If
you use Linux "top", the amount of swap space defined, aligns
nicely with the size of pagefile.sys it is (ab)using. There's
no real harm in it doing this.

I don't see a particular reason it would run into a permission
problem. Maybe the volume still isn't fixed from CHKDSK ? There
is a prohibition for putting stuff under the root of OS drives,
but there should not be a problem making C:\Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10.0 .

While booted into Kaspersky, open the Linux Terminal application
provided, cd to the folder in question and "touch test.txt" as
a means to create an item in the folder, and see if that works.
Use "ls" to verify that worked. You can "rm test.txt" to remove
the fake entry.

You can also delete the contents of the folder, so that
the folder still exists but there is nothing in it, then
try again. I have cleaned out that mess more than once,
over the years, and not managed to break it.

If you download a fresh Kaspersky Rescue CD, the definitions
in the file should be no more than a week old. This will reduce
the impact of bungled updates, and you can scan without updates.
The 8092 download page has a tool for loading Kaspersky on
a USB flash, if you're tired of burning CDs and throwing
them away because of stuff like this...

http://support.kaspersky.com/8092

Just a guess,
Paul