Is Your Hard Disk Making Strange Sounds?

They say prevention is better than cure so if your computer’s hard disk is making some strange clicking sounds, it’s probably time to backup data because noises are often symptoms of a failing hard drive.

Now not all sounds coming from the computer may be signs of trouble (for instance the culprit could be noisy fan and not the disk) so how you distinguish noises specific to the hard drive? Click for Sounds of crashed hard drives.

Only experts with thorough knowledge on all different symptoms on hard drive failure can actually tell you what sound is good or bad for your hard drive. Even so, it can be beyond repair sometimes. In such cases, there are usually two alternatives. One is to go replace your hard drive and restore back-up, but what if you do not have a recent back-up. The best solution is Stellar Phoenix Solutions.

At Stellar Phoenix, we have seen it all, our engineers are trained and certified in all leading encryption and forensics technologies and have scores of satisfied customers all over the globe.

Put us to the test today! Don’t be a victim of low prices and false promises. We guarantee our service standards.

• Call us at 1 855 BY STELLAR (297 8355) or click here to complete a service request form.
• You may also visit our web site directly to learn more about our capabilities

We are committed to building the value of the Stellar Phoenix brand and we stand behind our service to you. We want to earn your trust and confidence as your “go-to source” when you have data retrieval challenges.

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• Why a hard drive Fail? (stellarphoenixs.wordpress.com)

A Recent “Blue Screen of Death” Hitting All Computer Users

The Blue Screen of Death (also known as BSoD or Blue Screen), known officially as a Stop Error or a bug check, is the error screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems upon encountering a critical error, of a non-recoverable nature, that causes the system to crash. The term is named after the color of the screen generated by the error. In Unix-basedoperating systems, a similar term is kernel panic.

English: Windows XP / Vista BSoD. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Stop errors are hardware or driver related, causing the computer to stop responding in order to prevent damage to the hardware or data. In the later versions of Windows (Windows NT and later) the screen presents information for diagnostic purposes that was collected as the operating system performed a bug check.

Antivirus programs were designed to prevent “Blue Screen of Death”. This theory seems to have outdated itself. A recent update to Symantec‘s antivirus software rendered some Windows-based PCs inoperable, the security software maker disclosed Friday (July 13^th 2012) due to some compatibility problem. An update earlier in the week to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1 antivirus software for businesses caused some Windows XP-based computers to crash repeatedly with a “blue screen of death,” the company revealed on its Web site.

The security firm is ‘restructuring’ its SONAR signature quality assurance process after an incompatibility took down a number of Symantec-protected Windows XP machines. The company said on the weekend that a “full evaluation and root cause analysis of the issue” showed that the only customers to be affected were those running XP, certain third-party software, the latest version of Symantec’s behavior-based SONAR technology, and the July 11th rev11 SONAR signature set.

“The root cause of the issue was an incompatibility due to a three-way interaction between some third-party software that implements a file system driver using kernel stack based file objects — typical of encryption drivers – the SONAR signature and the Windows XP Cache manager,” Symantec Security Response team member Orla Cox said in a blog post. “The SONAR signature update caused new file operations that create the conflict and led to the system crash.”

Based on our root cause analysis, we determined that the problem is isolated to some Windows XP machines with file system drivers (usually encryption) running:

• Symantec Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition (SEP SBE) 12.1
• Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) 12.1
• Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud (SEP.cloud)

So far Mac customers have not reported any impact.  Additionally, Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 is not impacted.

The Blue Screen of Death occurs once Windows encounters a critical problem from which it cannot recover without halting operations after posting the diagnosis of the problem in the form of the Blue Screen error. In more recent versions of Windows, the remnants of the PC’s memory up to that point are saved to a dump file for analysis later by an expert.

Most of the time Registry (File system) errors are due to the one cause. Without going into too much detail, the registry is a set of entries and instructions made by every program and application that is installed and running on your system. So, if any of these registry entries are somehow corrupted or deleted, the program or device that depends on it is likely to malfunction and result in an error.

Only experts with thorough knowledge of how to edit the registry can repair it. Even so, it can be beyond repair sometimes. In such cases, there are usually two alternatives. One is to use Windows System Restore to go back to a restore point (date) before the registry was affected, but this can be slow and cumbersome. The best solution is Stellar Phoenix Solutions.

At Stellar Phoenix, we have seen it all, our engineers are trained and certified in all leading encryption and forensics technologies and have satisfied customers all over the globe.

Put us to the test today! Don’t be a victim of low prices and false promises. We guarantee our service standards.

• Call us at 1 855 BY STELLAR (297 8355) or click here to complete a service request form.
• You may also visit our web site directly to learn more about our capabilities

We are committed to building the value of the Stellar Phoenix brand and we stand behind our service to you. We want to earn your trust and confidence as your “go-to source” when you have data retrieval challenges.

Source: cnet, symantec

Is Mac Really Virus Free? Mac’s reputation for being virus-free has outlasted the reality.

For decades, Mac users enjoyed a major advantage over Windows users ‒‒ a general immunity to viruses, worms and Trojans. Apple Inc., in fact, has long cashed in on its reputation for being largely invulnerable to security breeches.

But times have changed. In recent months, Mac users have become familiar with the Flashback virus, a malware program that has infected more than 600,000 Macsworldwide ‒‒ about 1 percent of all Macs, according to an article on eWeek.com. Apple quickly came under fire for failing to foresee a set of flaws in Java that failed to detect malicious code.

Complicating things is the rising popularity of various handheld Apple products ‒‒ most notably the iPhone and iPad ‒‒ that put the Internet directly into consumers’ hands.  And, Macs have risen to a vital plateau ‒ they now account for more than 5 percent of the market, which, according to the U.K.-based tech website IT Pro, is the threshold that makes the development of viruses, worms and Trojans worthy it to scammers.

Mac’s reputation for being virus-free has outlasted the reality. Over the past year, Mac users have become increasingly familiar with malicious codes, such as the Trojans Tsunami and Revier/Imuler, and the phony antivirus program Mac Defender. And though the number of reported Flashback infections has sharply dropped, the fact is, Mac systems are vulnerable to attack and will continue to be so.  Apple has taken the threat seriously and implemented new security features designed to ward off infectious software. And the company has told its customers to keep its anti-virus software up to date.

But many Mac users continue to have a false sense of security. As far back as 2005, Toms Hardware reported that a major Mac virus was inevitable. A year later, the first breakout of OSX/Leap-A, a worm written specifically for Mac OS X, hit the scene.

By the end of 2008 Apple confirms, You Need Anti-Virus For Your Mac. Apple says the following in a technical note: “Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.”

One of the problems is that many Mac users are former Windows users who have not learned how to effectively operate Mac platforms. So they install Mac-usable Windows programs into their systems, opening themselves up to attack. According to IT Pro, approximately 1 in 5 Macs harbor some kind of Windows Trojan and as many as 1 in 36 Macs harbor Mac OS X-specific malware infections.

At Stellar Phoenix, we have seen it all. Our skilled staff has been trained in Mac systems by Apple itself. In fact, we started looking for solutions the day we heard that Mac systems were susceptible to viruses and malware. With track record of 98% recovery with at least 75% of data, we understand Apple technologies in depth. Our unique recovery methodology enables us to recover data from thousands of Mac PCs suffering from viruses and malware then most of our competition.

Put us to the test today! We guarantee our service standards.  Call us at 1-855-BY STELLAR (297-8355) or click here to complete a service request form. You may also visit our web site directly to learn more about our capabilities.

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Related articles

• 20% of all Macs ‘carrying malware’ (techradar.com)
• One in five Macs infected with Windows malware: Sophos (business.financialpost.com)
• Apple Macs spreading Windows malware (telegraph.co.uk)