truemane
2010-02-18, 03:41 PM
Hey there, Playground. If there's one thing I've learned here in the past few years it's that, between you, you all know pretty much everything there is to be known.
And so it is to you, the Playground, that I turn in my hour of need in the confident hope that your collective expertise will save me.
My wife's laptop got a nasty piece of malware. It was called Antivirus Plus and it did that thing where any time you did anything it popped 75 windows talking about how you've got all these viruses and click to remove them and all that.
No problem. I'm good at this stuff. So I boot the bad boy up in Safe Mode and run Spybot and AVG Antivirus and we get a few threats and I remove them. At the same time I went into Control Panel and Uninstalled the program causing all the trouble.
I then rebooted the machine so I could run Ad-Aware (which for some reason never works for me in Safe Mode), but then we h it the problem:
Black screen. Mouse Cursor. Nothing else. Ever.
So I reboot (the nasty way, with the power button) and try to go into Safe Mode again. No good. I go into Safe Mode and it logs and logs me right back out.
So, basically, I'm stymied. I can't actually access the computer. There isn't much on there that's irreplaceable, but there are some things that close. So I'm loathe to just wipe it and start over.
I tried going to into the thing using Recovery Console, but the folders where the good stuff is are not accessible. Probable because they're user-specific folders and they're not Shared. Or whatever you call it.
So. What can I do? Does anyone know what causes/caused this issue? Can it be fixed? Can I reinstall some of windows and leave what's already there untouched?
But failing that, even if I could access the folders (C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Desktop\Stuff I Can't Replace) then I'd be fine. Cope to CD or Flash Drive I could just format the whole thing a re-install from scratch.
I'm running Windows XP, SP3 (I'm pretty sure anyway) on a Dell Vostro Laptop.
Help me, Playgrounders in the Playground, you're my only hope.
And so it is to you, the Playground, that I turn in my hour of need in the confident hope that your collective expertise will save me.
My wife's laptop got a nasty piece of malware. It was called Antivirus Plus and it did that thing where any time you did anything it popped 75 windows talking about how you've got all these viruses and click to remove them and all that.
No problem. I'm good at this stuff. So I boot the bad boy up in Safe Mode and run Spybot and AVG Antivirus and we get a few threats and I remove them. At the same time I went into Control Panel and Uninstalled the program causing all the trouble.
I then rebooted the machine so I could run Ad-Aware (which for some reason never works for me in Safe Mode), but then we h it the problem:
Black screen. Mouse Cursor. Nothing else. Ever.
So I reboot (the nasty way, with the power button) and try to go into Safe Mode again. No good. I go into Safe Mode and it logs and logs me right back out.
So, basically, I'm stymied. I can't actually access the computer. There isn't much on there that's irreplaceable, but there are some things that close. So I'm loathe to just wipe it and start over.
I tried going to into the thing using Recovery Console, but the folders where the good stuff is are not accessible. Probable because they're user-specific folders and they're not Shared. Or whatever you call it.
So. What can I do? Does anyone know what causes/caused this issue? Can it be fixed? Can I reinstall some of windows and leave what's already there untouched?
But failing that, even if I could access the folders (C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Desktop\Stuff I Can't Replace) then I'd be fine. Cope to CD or Flash Drive I could just format the whole thing a re-install from scratch.
I'm running Windows XP, SP3 (I'm pretty sure anyway) on a Dell Vostro Laptop.
Help me, Playgrounders in the Playground, you're my only hope.