Is my friends computer infected?

[ShreddedWheat]

A friend at work has a gateway laptop with windows vista. It is not booting up and when it is going through command prompts at the top it mentions something about "grub" which I know is related to linux. But he doesn't have linux installed at all on his laptop (he doesn't even know what linux is) . Before it mentions grub it reads something like --floppy -- cd --etc.

I'm thinking that maybe someone was trying to use a small linux distro hack to break into his computer but it didn't go through/work for backdoor access? He mentioned the only thing he had on it was alot of mp3s.

Thoughts?

 

[jimmybgood9]

First of all, grub is not linux. It's often used to boot linux, but it can boot just about anything. Hence it's name, Grand Unified Bootloader. It has become quite popular these days for booting CDs, DVDs and especially flash disks.

Here's my thought. A specially modified version of grub is used to fool Windows into believing and reporting that it is permanently activated. If it's Vista, it's old. Did he buy this laptop used? Anyway, it looks like somebody put a grub bootloader on it. This can be fixed with a rescue disk.

Come to think about it, it could have been installed easily by an infected flash disk. I think it is more likely, though, that somebody who had physical access to it was messing with something they didn't understand.