Chosen Solution
My Omen 15, the sound was disabled. Eventually the (actual hp help file) directed me to a 3rd party URL. A Rootkit was installed. Can i clean/sanitize possibly Reformat from a Clean System? Thanks.
It would be useful to know what 3rd party URL you were redirected to. I’m a little surprised the HP support site would do that, unless it was a user-supplied fix in a forum, which might not be trustworthy. Also, what did it say to convince you that you had a rootkit? There are plenty of malicous “repair” tools which report non-existant problems and then install their own badness. It could be that your sound was disabled by a Microsoft update. I recently saw a case where that had happened twice. Clicking on the sound icon in the tray on the bottom right allowed the user to reenable it but I’m not sure exactly how he did it. He wasn’t a sophisticated user. Certainly try System Restore as suggested by @jayeff, but if it really is a rootkit it may well have dug itself into places System Restore is not aware of. I’m not sure I’d say most 3rd party AVs allow you to create a rescue disk. But one popular and respected (free) one is Kaspersky Rescue Disk. Download it and burn it to a CD or memory stick then boot off it. You don’t need another PC with AV. If it’s technically possible to clean, hopefully that will do it as it’s treating your Windows system as pure data so no rootkits can hide like they do when the system is running.
Hi @nyazilla , Do you have access to another PC that has a 3rd party AV (anti virus) program installed? Most AV programs have what they call a Rescue disc option, which allows you to create an AV boot up disc and run the AV program to scan the HDD for viruses and rootkits without having to start Windows. Here’s an example only which explains it better than I can. As I said most AV programs have a similar option. The one above is as I said, an example only of what is available to try. It saves having to lose all your data by doing a clean install, if you haven’t got a recent backup. Alternatively can you do a system restore back to a point in time before you installed the rootkit? Go to Control panel > recovery
