Technical advice (virus removal) needed...

[CallySleeper]

Running Vista x64.

After loading my laptop in normal mode, I get a white screen of death. I can only ctrl + alt + del, nothing else.

If I try and start in safe mode, all that happens is after a minute or two it automatically restarts, so I can't boot system restore. I've tried booting in "disable automatic restart after crashing" but that doesn't appear to help at all.

I don't have any boot CDs. Any assistance greatly appreciated!!!

 

[DaveNewcastle]

Are we sure that a virus is involved?
Unless there was some suspicious activity during the last session, then my guess is that there is a hardware fault with either the hard drive or the mainboard (or the connections between the two), though there could be other components at fault.

Before doing anything radical, I'd suggest getting hold of some bootable discs (not necessarily anything to do with Windows, there are bootable utilities of many kinds) which should confirm is the whole machine (apart from its hard drive) is working. If you can get a diagnostic disc, then that might help in identifying the problem.

There might also be a key-combination you can use to get the BIOS to display its progress through the start-up tests (POST), and that might reveal a failure somewhere before it even gets as far as trying to load Windows. (Such key-combinations vary between manufacturers and/or BIOS suppliers).

 

[CallySleeper]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the reply. Managed to run SR successfully and run it via the 'Repair Computer' boot option on F8 (instead of manually) and as such the problem is now sorted.

Ironically, I was considering at the time to run an antiviral/malware check, but heyho...

 

[cjp]

I know you are Ok now and it will never happen again but taking DaveNewcastle's advice you might like to get a 2Gb USB stick/ storage device tomorrow and spend 15-20 minutes following the instructions here

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows

Which will give you a way to start up your computer with no harm to your data as it runs from the USB drive and lets you (if you are lucky) get to your data on your hard drive if Windows fails to boot. Of course if your hard disc drive has failed then I just hope, for your sake, that you have backed up your important data

It is free software