Problems starting up the computer... possible virus?

[Crappopotamus]

My dad was exporting bookmarks from mozilla to the a drive, and the computer crashed. After that, he restarted and was stopped bc there was a virus on the a drive. He took the disk out, but now when you boot the computer, it just hangs after post. You just get the blinking curser, but no windows starts up.

I virus scanned the floppy and norton got this:
Source: The boot record of drive A: is infected with the Form virus.
link

i also noticed it had some startup files, command.com and autoexec.bat and something else, and i deleted those.

from what i can tell the virus shouldnt have caused this kinda problem... i booted into the winxp recovery console. chkdsk wouldnt run. and fixboot scares me, a google search revealed some people lost all their data using it

any idea what it could be? help help!

edit: the computer is/was running xp. the startup files may have been leftover from the disk, which at one point was a 98 startup disk.

 

[Twista]

sounds like when windows 9x (98) had crazy problems, but you have xp and im no help.
-twista gets the chill due to thinking of thoses 9x days--

 

[n0cmonkey]

Is Windows still there?

Were there any malicious actions in the autoexec.bat file?

 

[Crappopotamus]

im not sure.

i didnt look 🙁 i realized right after i deleted em. however, the floppy is labelled as a windows 98 boot disk originally.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Crappopotamus
im not sure.

i didnt look 🙁 i realized right after i deleted em. however, the floppy is labelled as a windows 98 boot disk originally.

They could have been left over from the disk's bootdisk days.

 

[pitupepito2000]

Originally posted by: Crappopotamus
im not sure.

i didnt look 🙁 i realized right after i deleted em. however, the floppy is labelled as a windows 98 boot disk originally.

I would personally would boot up with knoppix and back up you data and then do a fresh install of your OS, I would install win 2k on that machine if you want windows so bad.

I hope this helps,
pitupepito

Note: if you have a windows repair disk maybe you can fix it, I don't know how you would go about this since windows 9x doesn't have a recovery disk option that I know like windows xp.

 

[OZEE]

The "damage" you've listed doesn't sound like Form. Yes, he probably had Form, but it was a fairly benign virus -- it never did anything other than take up a little bit of drive space. So, you've got something else going on there... Good luck

 

[Crappopotamus]

Originally posted by: OZEE
The "damage" you've listed doesn't sound like Form. Yes, he probably had Form, but it was a fairly benign virus -- it never did anything other than take up a little bit of drive space. So, you've got something else going on there... Good luck

when i boot with the xp recovery console, and type dir should i be seeing something? cause it says something is wrong 🙁

 

[Crappopotamus]

bump....