How to remove a Flashback Mac virus

Mac and PC are equally affected by the virus these days. One of the most dominating Trojan virus called Flashback has hit more than thousands of users. These Trojan viruses injected into our Mac through downloads, attachment etc. This is a destructive virus which gets into the computer even without first gaining an administrative password. To get it eradicate completely, let us first see that how to diagnose a virus and then what is the best way to remove it.

How to find a virus?

To find the virus in Mac, let us first determine whether the CPU has virus or not. For this you should be aware of the 'Universally Unique Identifier' (UUID) of the Mac. To know the UUID of the Mac, first go to Finder and choose the menu item 'About this Mac', reveal the 'More Info' option and choose that. Then you will see the Hardware UUID. Just then locate and copy the Hardware UUID which is a series of 32 numerals and letters. Then you need to check that number on a particular website i.e. Flashbackcheck.com. At this point, follow the prompts and enter the UUID when prompts. At last after certain steps of this procedure, you get to know that whether your system has virus or not.

How to remove it?

To remove this Flashback virus manually, just follow the below steps to do so:

1) First open the Terminal and type the following command on Terminal:defaults read

/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment

2) After typing the command successfully, note down the value of DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

3) If you get the error message The domain/default pair of the command mentioned in step 1 does not exist, then move on to step 8 i.e. run the following command:

~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES.

4) If you didnt get any error, run the command in Terminal:

grep -a -o ‘__ldpath__[ -~]*’ %path_obtained_in_step2%.

5) Now again note down the value after '_Idpath_'

6) Now, before running the next commands in terminal, make sure that there is only one step after Step 2. After checking run the below commands: sudo defaults delete

/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironmentsudo chmod 644 /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info.plist

7) Now just delete the files obtained in step 2.

8) Now run the following command in terminal: defaults read

~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES.

9) If after running this command, you get an error that the domain/default pair of (/Users/joe/.MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist, then it means that the system is clean of this variant. If not, then run the below command on the terminal,

grep -a -o ‘__ldpath__[ -~]*’ %path_obtained_in_step9%

Again take note of the value of '_idpath_'.

10) Now after following the above command, again run the below command

~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIESlaunchctl unsetenv DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

11) At last, delete the files obtained in step 9.

Points to remember which will help you to protect Mac from these attacks:

• Use non-admin account for the daily purpose activities like surging on internet, chatting, mail check etc.
• Google chrome is considered to be secure for surfing on internet as it comes with the inbuilt feature of sanboxed flash player i.e. Its own functionality. Also, it is recommended that always use a secure browser to be on the safer side.
• Uninstalling java and flash player is considered to be the good security features to get safe from these virus attacks. And remember that Apple do not regularly update these features.
• Installing good antivirus and updating the latest program is considered the good practice.
• Try to install the good firewall software which will show you the exact network usage and will also prompt you to block or allow the application to connect to that network or not.

Thus follow these points to be on the safer side which will definitely save you from these virus attacks. If still not able to solve the problem, then use Sophos antivirus utility, a free antivirus solution for Mac.

Fix External Hard Drive Error: The Disk Structure is Corrupted or Unreadable in Windows 7

External hard drive are more popular these days because of their portability and availability in verity of sizes (still growing). It offers flexibility to carry large amount of data as well as helps you restore data if the primary location becomes inactive or seriously damaged. However, at times, external hard drive itself becomes inaccessible or prevent users to access the stored files. Be it virus infection, directory structure corruption, file system damages etc.

Once such external hard drives holding GB’s of valuable stuff, you may become panicked and frustrated as you’d have no idea about how to deal with such problems. Disk Structure corruption is yet another common error that comes whenever you tries to access your external hard drive and prevent users to access or copy the stored files.

As all of your files were stored there, formatting will permanently wipes your important files and make it permanent non recoverable even by using professional recovery tools. We’ll go through series of steps mentioned in this tutorial to fix this error easily (if you are lucky) and retrieve all of your important files as well as make the external drive usable again.

Below are the common error types you’ll see once similar situation strikes to your external hard drive:

                     

Error 0x80070571 : The disk structure is corrupted or unreadable

This disk in the drive is damaged

Please format this disk!!

The Drive isn’t accessible

The disk in drive is not formatted. Do you want to format it now?

Common reasons behind this error
External hard drive is created using moving mechanical moving parts which will may fails either sooner or later. Some unavoidable instances makes these drive inaccessible or damaged immediately and makes user data beyond the reach of known recovery software. Below are the some common reasons responsible for this situation:

• Improperly connecting or removing the drive
• The file system itself become damaged cannot be used to access the drive
• File system has become RAW which cannot be used any longer to access, manage or format the drive. In most instances, those drives becomes completely unusable.
• Large number of bad sectors and blocks has been emerged which prevents externally drive to perform normally. You’ll get freezing, hanging, corrupt files or similar issues when bad sectors took place on your drive.

Troubleshooting steps
As the drive is going through serious damages, there is no guarantee that any specific or subsequent steps could help you fixing the problem. However, let’s follow the standard procedure to deal with this error and see if we may able to resolve it:

• Right click on My Computer and choose Manage.
• Enter administrative details if asked and hit enter
• Go to Disk Management located under Storage at the left hand side menus.
• From the image below, check and make sure that any or all the volumes is listed along with the drive that’s connected externally. If you’ve recently faced the above mentioned error, you’ll see the volume status as RAW or offline
• Right click on that drive and choose to format it. As stated earlier, formatting will permanently wipes off all your important files and folders and your hope to get it back ever.
• Alternatively, you can right click on the external drive from Windows explorer interface and go to its properties.
• Choose the Tools tab and hit enter after selecting the check box stating ‘Check this disk for errors’.
• Once the operation completed successfully, try restarting your system and see if the error resolved.

Nothing helps, still can’t able to retrieve files?
Many times, the error will continue to persist even after following all the troubleshooting steps carefully. Additionally, nothing matters except your precious files that still clicking somewhere on your hard drive, right?? Don’t worry, as we are covering up some really useful utility that helps windows enthusiasts in getting back their data from various crucial situations of data loss like above.

Stellar Phoenix Partition Recovery is a life savior utility that can easily detect drives (both internal and external) going through serious damages and later, allows you to safely restore all your important files. Download the software from here and install it on your PC. Once installed, start the software from the desktop or installed software location. Make sure the drive is connected properly and shown in the software interface.

This tool offers powerful recovery options to recover data even from the severely damaged or inaccessible drives. As talked in the situation above and if the problem drive status is shown as RAW, you’ll still be able to recover data from RAW drives using this efficient partition recovery tool.

Click on the problem drive, listed under ‘Data Recovery’ > ‘Drive Recovery’ tab. The subsequent recovery methods will pop up as soon as you click on any particular drive or volume. Choose ‘Advanced Recovery’ from the available methods and let the software scans your drive completely (do not stop scanning at mid). Don’t panic if the software is taking too long to scan your problem drive. It may also possible that sometime the whole system freezes and needs you to restart the it. That’s because of the data recovery tools limitations and drive nature (RAW status) which takes really tough luck to getting detected on the system and recover data off the drive.

Once the scanning is completed, you’ll be able to see preview of any or all the recoverable files and folders using the preview pane, located at the top right corner. Chose or select desired files for recovery and click on Recovery button. Make sure that you’ve activated the software before start recovering your files as saving is disabled in demo version.

Do let us know your feedback or your particular situation if the error still persists!!

What to do when your Mac freezes and runs slow??

Does your Mac freezes? What to do? Sometimes while working on Mac, suddenly a delinquent application suck up all the resources and ultimately the Mac freezes. These applications makes the Mac slow. Also Frozen Mac can be easily recognized by the spinning ball which appears in the middle of the screen or when the cursor cannot move. This is the most dreaded condition for the Mac users which is very irritating. Let us see the short-term solutions and cases of frozen Mac:

Reasons of Mac freezes and becomes slow

• Too many applications are running at the same time
• You Mac memory is low
• Too many hidden and duplicate files
• Too many applications trying to access the hard disk at the same time
• Bad sectors on the hard drive
• Old software and cache content
• Cookies and plugins
• Corrupt files and extensions

Short term solutions of frozen Mac

Mostly, the solution of slow Mac is force quit and re-launch. We have to force quit the Mac when OS X completely becomes unresponsive and got stuck at one place. With this force shutdown, you can also may lose some unsaved data. So, this is a serious case to handle with the right remedy. Also, let us see the different categories of Mac to operate with this problem.

1) Force reboot using the power button on the keyboard

Mostly all laptops has a power button on the keyboard especially all the category of MacBooks like Macbook Air, retina Macbook pro etc. So, first hold the power button on the keyboard till the Mac shut down properly. This process may take a bit of seconds. Then after a few seconds, again hit the power button to boot the Mac.

2) Force reboot using the power button present at the back of the Mac

Usually this remedy is for iMac, Mac Mini etc. Gradually Mac desktops do not have the power button on the keyboard. Instead, their power button is the physical button located on the back of the Mac. To reboot this type of Mac categories, first press and hold the power button present at the back of the Mac. Hold that button until the Mac shut down properly. Now wait for a few seconds and press that button again for the system start initialization process.

3) Force quit the applications from Mac

Sometimes applications or programs stuck at one place and won't let us to do our task smoothly. So, If any such application stuck in the middle, force quit that particular application only which is causing a lot of problem. For this process, first from the Mac OS X dock feature, right-click on any open application. Just then holding down the option key will bring the options in Menu. Click on Force quit option.

4) Safe Booting

Safe boot will bring the Mac in its good health as it checks the bad hard drive status, loads kernel extensions etc. To run the process for safe boot, press the power button till your Mac starts. Then, press and hold the Shift key until you hear the start-up chime and release the key until the Apple logo appears. Safe boot may take the longer time to boot. After this, if your issue will get resolved, start your Mac normally.

These quick techniques will definitely bring you out of this major problem of Frozen Mac.

Tips to Speed up the slow iMac

Why my iMac is running slow? There are number of reasons of slow iMac. The reason is the asthmatic ant crawling on iMac with the loads of heavy applications. Lets see the various causes and solutions:


                                                     


1) Reset SMC and PRAM

SMC manages various functions like start-up hard drive spin down cycles, power button response, thermal monitoring etc. So if SMC will got corrupt, then definitely your iMac become slow. So fixing it is an important task. For this, first shut down your computer and unplug the power cord. Then press and hold your power iMac button for 15 seconds and release it. At last, reconnect your iMac power cord, wait for 5 seconds and turn on your iMac. Now PRAM is meant for memory module. Functions of this are volume monitoring, display solution control, speaker volume control etc. Resetting the PRAM is the way to increase the speed of the iMac. To fix it, first shut down your computer and power your iMac back on. Then press the CMD + Option + P + R keys together until you see the grey startup screen. These 2 resets SMC and PRAM can fix your slow iMac.

2) Disable antivirus or firewall programs

The programs constantly check your iMac activities, resulting in slowing down the process. So if your iMac becomes slow then just disable these programs temporarily and see the results. This can fix your issue.

3) Corrupt Preferences file

Preferences files can easily become corrupt. It totally depends on the certain applications. If due to some applications your iMac is running slow, just delete that preference file and relaunch the app.

4) Software update loading

Updating the software is the most crucial task to maintain the performance of the iMac. Keeping the software up to date is a good practise. After updating the software, reboot the iMac.

5) Caches, Log files and Temporary files

Cleaning the caches, log files and temporary files will immensely affect the performance of the system. You can clear these files from Library folder.

6) Startup items

At the time of start-up, certain applications cause to start at the time of login. These login items cause the system to take little memory and CPU usage. To optimize the start-up items you need to remove some of the start-up options which is causing the iMac slow at the time of start-up. To remove, select the Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Users and group -> Login items.

7) Permission conflict

Each and every file in iMac OS X have a set of permissions. It determines the users or applications that can access them. Sometimes permissions are incorrect and we need to repair it using Disk utility. To repair permissions select Disk utility app from the Applications -> utilities folder and then click on First Aid tab. Then at last click on Repair Disk Permission button.

8) Clean the hard drive

Always make sure that you should leave at least 10% free space on your hard drive because your iMac automatically utilizes free space on your hard drive as virtual memory. Delete all the unwanted files, apps, downloaded items and finally remove it from the Trash folder also. This will optimize the space and performance of the hard drive. If you are unable to delete all the junk files from your iMac and they are causing your iMac extremely slow, then use SpeedUp iMac software which will automatically cleans all the junk from your iMac.

9) Upgrade your hardware

Old hardware causes the speed of the iMac drastically to a low level. Actually this task is quite costly but you will surely notice an improvement in speed.

Therefore, these are some of the useful steps which can pull you out from the slow iMac problem.