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HELP! Macbook Pro went mental.

D

dogactor87

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 10, 2011
4
0
Last night something strange happened to my laptop. I think it may be a virus. I was talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger and he sent me a link to a well known calender shop. I had a look and noticed the main font was weird but ignored it and then went to google which was also the same odd font. I had downloaded some fonts earlier in the day so I checked FontBook and Arial had a problem so I did what my mac recommended to do to fix it. The font then changed back to normal Arial. I then went to google and now there was nothing. The font had vanished! I checked my word doc and that too had made all my text invisable. It seemed fine if I used a different font though. So I restarted my laptop hoping that would fix it.
But it then got to the desktop and images are missing their thumbnails, the dashboard is back to default and if I tried to open anything even my Sophos virus scanner trial it did the spinning wheel thing and nothing happened.

I looked online and saw others had this happen so I followed their fixes of restarting and holding shift on startup. This has made things work but some stuff is having problems. For example Safari crashes after a few minutes and when I tried to scan to see if it was a virus it came up with this error. http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/13026.html The shield isn't blue so I rang tech support and they cant help because its a trial version.

I'm now at a loss as to what to do. I know on a pc I can restore to a previous date but not a clue how I can do that on a mac. Does anyone have any ideas how to fix my laptop? I'd greatly appreciate any help.
 
Sorry I can't help apart from the fact that you can't get a virus on a Mac (Unless it's running Windows!).

I also note you are running Sophos. This is a real scare mongering misinformation site as far as Macs are concerned. Take everything on that site with a large pinch of salt! ;)
 
Considering that Sophos says that 10.4 is the latest version of Mac OS X, I wouldn't give them a pinch of my trust! :rolleyes: :apple:
 
The smart money is that your fonts are messed up. Continue working that line of research. The chances that you got malware (virus/trojan/etc) on the same day as messing about with your fonts is incredibly small.

There are no known viruses (in the wild) for OS X. Of course, it's possible that you caught an unknown one.... but the probabilities are incredibly small. So far, there are no announcements about others catching one.

There are a couple of Trojans known for OS X - so much more likely that you caught a Trojan than a virus - however, afaik, the 2 known Trojans are attached to pirated versions of Photoshop and iWork - and they don't mess up the fonts. Again, you may have caught a previously unknown Trojan - but the probabilities incredibly small.

The chances of messing up fonts while working with them are far higher than catching malware, so ..... I'd suggest continuing to work on that.

If you set up a new user account, do the messed up fonts afflict that account too?
 
My fonts appear to be fine now. The problems now are that it will only work in Safe Mode, Safari crashes pretty much straight away and I've just tried connecting both of my external hard drives to back up some stuff and my laptop can't find either.

Thanks for what help I've recieved so far though.
 
dogactor87 said:
My fonts appear to be fine now. The problems now are that it will only work in Safe Mode, Safari crashes pretty much straight away and I've just tried connecting both of my external hard drives to back up some stuff and my laptop can't find either.

Thanks for what help I've recieved so far though.
Click to expand...

If you are still in your 90 day (iirc), or if you bought AppleCare, call Apple. Have them help you sort it out. If you are in your first year but past the complimentary phone support period, I'd suggest buying AppleCare. It's not a bad idea to get AC with a portable, and the added bonus is that you can get phone support for the entire 3 years. At this point, it sounds like you might need it.

Good Luck.
 
Jessica Lares said:
Try a PRAM/SMC reset: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

It helps to fix some things, maybe even your issue. It'll reset most display settings.

And try a disk permission repair in Disk Utility.
Click to expand...

Thank you sooooo much! That worked, well it appears that everything is back to normal and even Sophos is working so did and scan and it found a Trojan called W32/GetCodec-A. Bet thats the bugger than messed everything up.

Awww its nice to have stuff working again. Can't thank you all enough for helping me :)
 
dogactor87 said:
Thank you sooooo much! That worked, well it appears that everything is back to normal and even Sophos is working so did and scan and it found a Trojan called W32/GetCodec-A. Bet thats the bugger than messed everything up.
Click to expand...
It's impossible that the W32/GetCodec-A worm (not a trojan) affected your Mac OS X installation in any way. It's a Windows worm that cannot execute on Mac OS X.

Mac Virus/Malware Info
 
Be careful with fonts on the mac. A corrupt font can really mess things up. This was likely the problem and chances are it will return.
 
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