Nvidia - Geforce Experience - hacked?

Gixer

Gixer

Gixer

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Joined
28 May 2004
Posts
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Location
Southampton
I've been having a rather fun evening so far. When I updated my nvidia drivers recently on the release of BF4 it came along with the Geforce Experience piece of software.

Today on starting it up it stated I needed to update the Geforce Experience software so I the install button and waited. Nothing happened, it just sat there. I had to shut the PC down in the end. On reboot a lot of my C: drive has been deleted! Not just hidden but physically deleted.

I have NOD32 anti-virus and have never had any issues for several years so I'm rather gutted that the one that does get me has physically destroyed data. I find it rather odd that it is linked to the Nvidia software however.

I had a read on google and cannot find anyone else having the same issue so I'm at a bit of a loss as to what it actually is causing this.

In my wisdom I got the system up and running again and after re-installing a few things I run the graphics driver again. At this point I didn't realise it was the Geforce Experience software update causing my issues so when it asked I run it again. Again it froze so reboot again and OH my. Now I have literally nothing on the C: drive and I'm getting all kinda of crazy errors on boot up. It's deleted my web browser so currently I'm having to reinstall windows on my SSD. Not a great solution as the old OS will be placed into another directory but I currently have no way so run secure erase on the drive to start afresh.

Anyone else been having any issues with the Geforce experience software causing anything like this to happen?

Cheers
Paul
 
Running it without a problem, it's likely nothing to do with that though, have you checked the event log on the PC for clues? System/application logs should hint at the problem.

start > run > eventvwr
 
Halfmad said:
10,000+ posts and you can't read the thread you quote Asim?

It's talking about 8.1 and possibly causing issues, plenty are running it without any problems.
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I didn't quote anything. I merely provided a direct link to the thread so OP can read it himself and investigate further to see if he is affected.

I also used the word "maybe" in regards to the Windows 8 thread.

In my professional opinion, the symptoms do suggest a corrupted/damaged/faulty SSD, rather than a signed installer from a trusted vendor actually deleting files.
 
asim18 said:
In my professional opinion, the symptoms do suggest a corrupted/damaged/faulty SSD, rather than a signed installer from a trusted vendor actually deleting files.
Click to expand...

How? He successfully re-installed windows it's only when he installed the driver that he had issues.

One small bug in a device driver can easily play havok with any other piece of hardware attached to the system. It's very rare but can happen..... It has happened to me because I once wrote some dodgy kernel code :D
 
Subliminal Aura said:
How? He successfully re-installed windows it's only when he installed the driver that he had issues.

One small bug in a device driver can easily play havok with any other piece of hardware attached to the system. It's very rare but can happen..... It has happened to me because I once wrote some dodgy kernel code :D
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Flash storage doesn't work in the same way as a hard drive - Flash=Electric, Hard=Magnetic. One minute you can write something and next it can be literally gone. Its entirely possible to install Windows onto faulty flash it's just a matter of how long it will stay put.
 
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asim18 said:
Flash storage doesn't work in the same way as a hard drive - Flash=Electric, Hard=Magnetic. One minute you can write something and next it can be literally gone. Its entirely possible to install Windows onto faulty flash it's just a matter of how long it will stay put.
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WTF has that got to do with what I suggested ? :confused:

In my unprofessional experience I would also be also looking at faulty drivers and memory... Don't jump the gun kid, learn to eliminate possible causes first ;)
 
Thanks for the replies all. In my anger I deleted the windows.old directory that was created when I re-installed Win7 so I won't be able to look at the system log.

I too thought it might be my SSD giving up the ghost but CrystalDiskinfo still has it at 85% life, if that means anything. My PC is back up and running perfectly OK I just need to re-install everything. I've been building PC's etc for over 14-15 years so like to think I'm a little bit savvy and I like to think I've learnt my lessons online many years ago now. After running the geforce update I run anti-virus scans etc and it found nothing. It had simply just deleted a whole chunk more of my C: drive.

It is the most weird thing I've ever seen on my PC. On a note I have installed the Nvidia drivers that the 'dodgy' geforce experience came with but haven't installed the geforce experience part and all is perfectly fine! I am of course now extremely nervous about putting geforce experience anywhere near my PC again. I have since also found a thread on the Nvidia forums where someone else has had exactly the same thing happen to them earlier in the year.

Totally bizarre if you ask me. More annoying than anything as I now have to re-install everything.
 
P.S. my SSD has been at 85% life according to CrystalDiskInfo since about 1 week after building my current PC.
 
Will do. I'd have thought I'd have seen errors due to ram sooner though as I play Microsoft FSX which is pretty hard on all resources.

I didn't realise how many updates the system would need after a re-install. Even with fibre broadband it is taking its time.
 
Gixer said:
Will do. I'd have thought I'd have seen errors due to ram sooner though as I play Microsoft FSX which is pretty hard on all resources.

I didn't realise how many updates the system would need after a re-install. Even with fibre broadband it is taking its time.
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Just take a disk image this time before installing the Geforce wipe my drive experience ;)
 
Hi,

Yesterday i ended up being the victim of the exact same problem that Gixer experienced at the start of this month.

Nvidia notified me via a popup that a new graphics driver, and a new version of Nvidia Experience was available to download and install. I began by installing Nvidia Experience, but when i clicked on the 'Install Now' button, it just froze. To fix the problem i killed the program in task manager and tried again, but it still wouldn't work. I killed it again and tried one last time, before giving up. After being unsuccessful in updating Nvidia Experience, i updated the driver instead. The driver installation went fine, and rebooted my computer.

When the computer came back on, i instantly noticed a problem. My 'Classic Shell' start menu (Windows 7 start menu in Windows 8) had been reset and all programs removed from it. I checked in Windows Explorer and most were okay, but the Nvidia Experience had wiped out many important programs, such as GTA 4, Live For Speed, Simraceway, Photoshop CS6 and After Effects CS6. I was absolutely devastated, especially with GTA, because i had spent many days modding it and making progress.

I then booted up Chrome to find out what the hell was going on, only to discover that the whole of Chrome had been reset. All my bookmarks and extensions gone.

I restored some old backups of GTA 4 and LFS onto the computer, but when i tried to launch LFS, i got a black screen. My Intel graphics and Nvidia graphics had been completely messed up as well. I had to uninstall both graphics drivers and then reinstall them, loosing all my settings.

Tomorrow i will have to download Photoshop and After Effects again, which will take many hours on my connection, and then reinstall them.

It's lucky the damage wasn't any worse.

I'm seriously ****** off with Nvidia to say the least. Can't believe one of their main graphics programs, which is distributed all around the world, could be destroying thousands of people's hard drives, perhaps without them even realising it.

Amazing...

Computer Specs:

Acer V3-571G Notebook
Windows 8 (Downgraded From 8.1)
Intel i7-3610QM
8GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 640M - 2GB VRAM
 
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Nvidia notified me via a popup that a new graphics driver, and a new version of Nvidia Experience was available to download and install. I began by installing Nvidia Experience, but when i clicked on the 'Install Now' button, it just froze. To fix the problem i killed the program in task manager and tried again, but it still wouldn't work. I killed it again and tried one last time, before giving up.
Click to expand...

So you executed a trogan 3 times and yet you blame NVIDIA.
Clearly you have malware that throws up a fake NV update message and you dutifully executed the malicious code.
 
PCZ said:
So you executed a trogan 3 times and yet you blame NVIDIA.
Clearly you have malware that throws up a fake NV update message and you dutifully executed the malicious code.
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I clearly haven't executed a trogan 3 times and blamed NVIDIA.
I clearly haven't got malware that throws up a fake NV update message and dutifully executed the malicious code.

I went through the official Nvidia GeForce Experience program to get to the update. I know i said in my original post that a popup came up, which it did, but to get to the update i navigated to the actual Nvidia updating program and did it that way.

If it was a trojan or malware, you'd expect Avast anti-virus or Antimalware Bytes to throw up a warning message, don't you think? Both are on fully updated virus databases, so it would be pretty damn tricky to bypass them.

I can assure you, i did not execute a any malware or trojans, thank you very much!
 
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