Help!! Laptop won't boot due to a virus`

[Cipherous]

My sister's been overseas for the past year and hadn't updated her Mcafee Virus scan for long as she can remember (apparently not a computer nerd like me ) But now she can't boot into windows (the starting screen displays but it says can't find C drive) and then when I tried using the CD rom ( D drive) and it says invalid drive and now both A and B (dunno why theres a B drive?) drives go to the floppies and i can't access the CD rom. I was thinking if I reformat the computer's C: (I can access C drive but if I go to another drive, I can't go back to the C: cause it says C drive not found) Maybe the virus would go away and I can access the C: drive again. BTW its a old compaq presio notebook ( a pentium I, 233mhz...I know I know, she needs a new one but shes kinda broke right now ) and I can't access the BIOS. Any suggestions? I am going to make a windows boot up disk and a virus scan disk from my computer and hopefully, it'll be fixed. Any ideas?

 

[bacillus]

you could try booting up with a win98 startup floppy & at the A: prompt type "fdisk /mbr" <enter>
then type "sys C:" <enter> & see if you can reboot to windows!

 

[corkyg]

A current AV boot disk can help, and don't forget to have another with the latest .DAT file.

If all that fails, then use the 98 Boot disk, fdisk it all, reformat and start over. That kills the virii and anything else.

 

[Kp99]

If the virus is in the boot sector, you might want to low level format the drive, get the program from the vendor of the hd, all it does it write zeros to the whole drive wiping out whatever was making the drive mess up. I had to do this once on my Compaq E500 and it works fine now.