Fried

**mimseycal** · 18-08-2010, 09:42

to a cinder

My dearly beloved grandson managed to download a redirect virus yesterday. While trying to remove the bugger, without asking his nan for her sage advice, he managed to fry my C: drive to a crisp. Well, no not quite ... he just managed to scramble the OS so that it now is on a boot-up loop.

I've managed to find an old H/D that I had from a previous PC which has enabled me to access the web and will now proceed to try and find a fix for my favourite H/D. At the moment all I can think of is reformatting the disk and starting from scratch. If anyone has any ideas of what else I might try before taking such drastic action ... Please feel free to advance them.

Have to take my next door neighbour to her hospital appointment now ... will have a look later before starting major surgery ... on the H/D

**jools182** · 18-08-2010, 10:18

oops

timey is probably your best bet

Ck · 18-08-2010, 10:19

Sorry, I don't know anything about PCs but I hope you can get it fixed quick soon.

**Ben** · 18-08-2010, 15:50

Firstly I'm surprised the virus was able to be installed, did he disable the antivirus software?

Anyway, on to things.

Assuming you can access the drive, you could go in and remove the virus, most virus programs will do this for you. TO remove it fully you may have to make registry changes, so you'll need to find out the exact name of the virus you had.

However, that's obviously a solution for before the lad tried to fix it himself. Unless you know everything he did, you could be leaving your computer open to allsorts of things, because you simple won't know what files are actually missing. However, if he just randomly deleted files, something as simple as restoring from the recycle bin may work. If he started doing stuff with the registry, unless you have a backup (I have regular backups because CCleaner makes them every time I scan my registry) you're pretty much screwed unless you take it to a pro, and even then most of the time they will prob just advise wiping and starting again.

If you do have access, the good news is that you can get all your personal files off it (obviously virus scan before you move them onto another HDD, just in case).

Personally, I'd grab my personal files and start again.

**Ben** · 18-08-2010, 15:51

One thing, if you want to be able to boot it, try booting into safe mode.

**timey** · 18-08-2010, 17:46

Well if you will let kids use your PC.

**timey** · 18-08-2010, 17:48

On a more constructive note (

), do you have your Windows disk? This can be used to repair a lot of things if you just boot up with it in the drive. For this, you'd have to have the CD drive set up as the first boot device, which can be set in the BIOS before boot up.

If not, Ben's advice seems sound.

**mimseycal** · 18-08-2010, 18:31

Sorry ... just got back ... things went a tad pear-shaped for my neighbour and the diagnosis (and prognosis) is about as bad as can be ... spent the day with her till her son in law came home from work and her daughter could leave the kids with him.

Tried safe mode but it seems the little hooligan tried that as well and then tried to reconfig the boot disk. it won't even boot up into that anymore; it just loops the loop. It looks as if he has managed to partition part of the flippin boot up sequence (or whatever it is you techno bobs call it) ... I've spent a few hours last night trying to find my original windows disk but ... what with the move and everything.

I reckon the best bet is reformat and start from scratch. I have no access to it what so ever however that isn't too bad. My C:\ drive was my working drive ... most of my stuff is actually saved on my D:\ H:\ and F:\ drives with the latter two being external H/Ds ... I've lost most of my email contacts and some music I wasn't too worried about (mostly stuff he downloaded really) ...