User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC

personal tech

Maybe they were looking for Private Data

ON CALL Fronting up to work on Friday morning can feel like a mistake, but The Register tries to make it worthwhile by bringing you a new installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lee" who told us about his time as sysadmin at the headquarters of a retail company.

"It was about the year 2000 and I was a newly minted Certified NetWare Engineer administering Novell servers," Lee reminisced. Before long, Lee was running the teams that managed email servers and provided desktop support for over a thousand users.

"I got to know just about everybody in the HQ and became known as the go-to guy for all things technical," he proudly told On Call.

One Friday afternoon, a vice president called to complain he couldn't access any files from his PC because someone else was using them.

Lee found this a little odd, so he asked if the veep was seeing a "file in use" dialog in Word or Excel.

The veep replied that he was indeed seeing an error that read "General failure is reading Drive C" – but that was obviously someone using the handle "General Failure" to mask their identity.

Lee's next question was very precise.

"I asked if the error message read 'General failure is reading Drive C:'" he told On Call.

The VP re-read the dialog and corrected himself, telling Lee the exact text was "General failure reading Drive C:"

At this point, Lee had good news and bad news.

The bad news was that the error meant the VP's disk had died.

The good news was that nobody was using the handle "General Failure," so the company didn't have a miscreant rummaging around on the network.

Lee arranged a support call and advised the veep that he would be getting a new disk and might even be in line for a whole new PC.

Have your users misinterpreted an error message? If so, click here to send On Call an email. We can't be clearer than that – or more sincere in our desire to share your story with your fellow Reg readers. ®