small issue..

[Marinski]

I'm workin on a friends laptop. It is an older laptop and was getting a bunch of pop ups. So i installed Anti-virus and there was a trojan on there. Its one of those ones that sends a million emails or something. McAfee says its quarantined and removed. I download ad-aware, counter spy, etc. and then reboot and try to boot into safe mode to do additional scanning and i get this message "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe" and thats it. I reboot and this time there is no message and i get into safe mode. My question is what is this related too? The trojan or is this something else? Should i do a repair of XP?

 

[shadowofthesun]

I had this issue once on an old laptop. I had no clue what it was either, but a friend of mine told me it was a virus in the boot sector. I was unable to confirm this as a few weeks later the laptop died altogether. As a sidenote, another problem I was having at the time was that there was not enough HDD space for the swap file. I would just reformat the disk and reinstall everything, including windows. That would fix either of the problems, or any other problem it may be short of a hardware failure.

 

[John]

Basically you hung up while booting to safe mode. Since you're there now I would not worry about it right this second. Go ahead and continue with the malware removal process. I would also recommend that you disable the system restore and click the first link in my sig for additional information. 🙂 If the OS is hosed after the removal you can do a repair install.

 

[Marinski]

Yep. Thats exactly what happened. It froze while it was listing all the files before entering safe mode. The Malware guide was alot of help. Thanks for putting that together. I've had it bookmarked for awhile and I'm familiar with it. Also have been messing around with a Bart PE. I think i cleaned it out pretty good. Except for some programs that need to be removed. Its running decent though. Probably should have just completely reinstalled the OS. This laptop is 5 years old and still has the original OS install on it.