Gotta virus or something on home PC. Dell with XP Media Center. I can get the computer on, goes to the login screen ( or Welcome screen with all the users listed ) and all of the users and passwords work fine , but as soon as you log on, it automatically logs out and saves personal settings. Any help would be greatly appreciated! I hate to lose a bunch of pictures and misc stuff! The rest of it I could care less! I'll buy another computer! Also.......would there be any way to hook my computer ( or just hard drive ) to another computer to get the info out of it? Kind of like hooking up and external hard drive thru a USB port or something? That would be too cool! Thanks for any help........

 

Boot to safe mode by pressing F8 while booting.Try to do a system restore to a date back before the problem started.If that fails,click start/run,type sfc /scannow and provide your system disk if it asks for it.
You can pull the drive from the computer and recover the files from it as well with the proper hardware.You can also install it in another computer as a slave and get the files from it but in all cases if you have a virus you will likely infect any other drives as well.Good luck.Ron G

 

Tried the safe mode , all 3 actually ( with networking and another one...can't remember ). So I can't actually hook it straight to another computer ? I have a better antivirus on another that I can hook it to. What additional software would I need to recover it? Won't booting from the CD cause me to lose everything else on the computer?

 

You will need to have the USB ports available on the defective computer then hook up an external harddrive and transfer your files.You can buy the adapters for about ten bucks to connect another drive to a USB port.If you can find a USB drive big enough that should work as well.Ron G

 

i would just take the bad hard drive out of the old computer.

update your antivirus & SPYBOT & firewall on your good computer

take the good computer apart.

a hard drive has power & a ribbon cable going to it.

there is a jumper on a HD to set whether it is MASTER or SLAVE.

you want the bad drive to be SLAVE on its jumper settings (you should have to change it - it's four pins, and a plastic part you move with tweezers)

and the other to be MASTER (it should be - usually ship that way)

plug in power to hard drive, make SURE it's not touching the motherboard or anything ( put it in a zip loc bag if you have to)

reboot, it will usually have to go into the BIOS to auto detect the new drive on the ribbon calbe

it should boot normal.

now, run ALL your scans (anti virus, spybot) on the bad drive.

when the OS (operating system) is running on a drive, it can't find somethings.

but when the OS is on another drive, it really gets in there & finds stuff.

so that SHOULD clean that old drive.

then, AFTER you have cleaned it,

scan good computer again

reboot, scan them again,

THEN just use windows to copy the files from one drive to another.

i have about 4 hard drives in my computer:
-OS
-pictures
-movies
-music

PM me or call me if you need help.

 

That sounds like what I was wanting to do! I may PM you for a phone number! I might need a little "hand holding" to get it done! LOL

 

O.K......my "good" computer has XP Professional on it, and the "bad" one has XP Media Center.....will that be a concern?

 

Also.....I think I caused the problem when deleting files from the infected computer. How will I know which ones to transfer back? And will they work from Prof. to Med. Center?

 

Doesn't matter. The drive with XPMC will be the slave so that OS will not be used.

MikeyB

 

What files did you delete?

Once you scanned the drive reinstall and try to boot back into safe mode. When in safe mode go back a few weeks to a known good backup.

MikeyB

 

When I tried to restore ,before I shut it down and had all of these other login problems, there was only one restore point and it appeared to have been created at the time the virus showed up?

 

i would swap the drives, grab your data,

then put old drive in old compy,

and boot off CD to restore the OS.

you do NOT need to lose data to do this, it usually just scans for missing OS files, and puts them back on there.

just click "repair existing windows installation" or whatever it says.



if you got EVERYTHING you need off it, you could re-format it
but if you do that too much, Microsoft can deny your OS as valid, and you won't get updates & support that you paid for.

 

Here is the best way to get rid of viruses without the hassle of Windows interfering. Download a copy of Knoppix (Distrabution of Linux). Boot from the cd, once you have boot in get a command prompt. Type in fresh clam, this will update all the virus definitions. You can then scan your hard drive without a virus being able to interfere with your virus scanner. If you need help feel free to message me.

 

Well.....for the GOOD news........got all of the needed files off of the old hard drive. Ran virus scan, got rid of 18 infected files! Hooraayy! Not so fast.............still unable to login under each user, or anything for that matter. I can see the recovery files on the hard drive when I have it in the other PC, but cannot for the life of me even get the computer to boot in safe mode with command prompt! Arrrggghhh! Oh well........got the files, and a recovery disk to be delivered tomorrow courtesy of DELL, and all should be as close to normal as possible! Will just reimage the hard drive, wipe as much of the old as possible off, and put in the needed files. Pain in the rear, but better than could have been! Thanks for all the help guys! I know, whatever the situation may be, the DTR guys always come thru! Thanks again!

Andy

 

Take a look at this nifty software:

http://drivesnapshot.de/

If you have got an USB disk or something the like you can create your own image of your computer and store it there. You will need a bood CD like WinPE or so to rebuild your computer from an image even after a disk crash.
I'd suggest getting into doing backups of all machines at home regularly because losing data always hurts and an external 500GB drive won't break the bank.

AlpineRAM