BleepingComputer.com: Devastated computer.. any help would be appreciated

I had a horrible virus the other day and having been trying to fix it. Well i finally got kaspersky to update and run. It caught all kinds of stuff. I ran the program a couple more times and realized it was a reoccuring virus in the registry and decided to just do a full system restore. My computer wont't even let me do that. It gave me a fatal error and shut down. The virus deleted some files necessary to do this I believe (not sure of course) so I went back on and ran the program again and just kept working the virus count down and having the program delete what it could. Well after the last run through... windows loads up, but no icons, no task bar, no ability to get into task manager, no keys bring up anything. Not even in safe mode. At this point I would be completely content with losing ALL info and just being able to use my system recovery cd. I tried booting from the disk and pc angel does not go from the disk it seems even when i change the boot menu to only allow cd rom boot. I am lost and very frustrated. I hope there is someway I can at least be able to do a system recovery?

System manufacturer and model?

Do you have complete restore/recovery CDs?

Have you checked your owner's manual...on how to use these restore/recovery CDs?

Louis

It is an emachine W3502 with 1gb ram and a 3.2 processor. I read the owners guide from the web site and tried getting help from whoever bought (emachine) them out, but I am out of warranty and all they did was send me to a guide that I had already read. It came with one microsoft windows xp home edition system recovery cd/dvd.

In you frustration, after you changed the boot order in the BIOS, Were you sure that you "Saved Changes" then Exit and not just Exit?

Yeh, I thought about that and double checked a couple of times and made sure cd was first boot. I even disabled the other drives a couple of times when just moving cd rom to the first boot order didnt work. :-( No luck

And just in case no one can help. If I end up having to buy a new hard drive would that solve my problem? I just want to prepare myself for the worst

I had the icons come up on one of my attempts but it froze after about 20 seconds. If I could have just been able to get to do a couple things I think i could have gotten a recovery done. Back to square one... hope there is something i can do besides buy a new hard drive

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Not if you can't boot from the CD drive. Plus with a brand new drive you will have to buy a retail XP CD. the recovery one won't work

I'm assuming you do not have the option "boot to last known good configuration" when trying Safemode.
How are you trying to open Task Manager?

I did have the boot to last good configuration option but that did not work either. I tried all kinds of other stuff from forums everywhere and nothing worked. I could tell the way the virus hit my computer that the cd rom was fine it was just the files that the virus destoyed that caused it not to be able to boot. I couldnt wait any longer so I caved and bought a new hard drive. The recovery disk worked fine with it. I guess it could have been worse :-) Thanks for trying to help. Case unsolveable

Malware could not cause your cdrom to stop booting

Nothing on your hard drive could do that

Can you pull your existing drive and temporarily install it as a slave drive on a working machine? Make sure it is up to date with antivirus software and try scanning the suspect drive without opening it. I have done this. One caused weird problems such as these when the slave drive burnt up, another time I had a pc with a bad mother board exhibit similar symptoms.

Another pc might let you clean the drive more thoroughly and run checking tests. you might be able to see whats left on it after it's disinfected sufficiently.out

edit-typo

This post has been edited by wyndy34: 21 February 2009 - 10:52 AM