Hi guys,
obviously, it could be a hardware problem, however, what makes me think otherwise is the fact that when i first encountered this problem over a week ago, i did a fresh install. Everything worked perfectly until i accessed the old drive over my network (which is now on another system) and copied some files back over to my new installation.
After doing the above, i started to encounter errors almost immediately that progressively got worse and more numerous...and to me, appeared unrelated to a single cause (ie different programs performing different functions began to play up). These were the exact same symptoms i encountered, with what i believe is a virus, initially.
Also, i have had to disable the drive on my other system, and perform an OS rollback as the other system started to encounter identical problems as well after slaving this drive on it.
I am absolutely certain there is malicious activity associated with this problem...i just cannot understand why virus checkers are not finding it?
In fact, I am almost at the point of being convinced that scanning the drive for the malicious activity using a virus checker, power eraser, avast, avg, kapersky, windows defender (ive tried them all) seems to only drastically increase its destructive nature.
I need a program which is capable of getting at this thing outside of windows. It is a real nasty one thats for sure.
I would like to try all of the above mentioned options but i am now afraid to even enable and scan the drive as i know once it gets into my other computer system, i will need to reflash the bios before i can put the normal hdd back in. I am also worried about it getting into my home network...could it also infect our T-box, my technicolor gateway, our T-hub and telephone?
I am that scared of what this thing may have done to my home network, emails and other online accounts, i only do my internet banking on my mobile phone app.
Edit,
oh i almost forgot to mention this...it may or may not be important.
A few months ago i set up on the computer that intially got infected, a Oracle VM-Virtualbox LAMP (Ubuntu) running on our static ip address. I was using it to serve development websites i was building at the time using wordpress multisite. I am not expert when it comes to webserver security. Perhaps i got infected via the virtual machine and static ip address? I always run security software on all of my wordpress websites (Wordfence is my favourite one) so i thought i should be reasonably safe from this kind of threat.
I do know, i have downloaded suspect software in the past and am fairly sure this is where the virus came from.