God this is stupid... Formatting...

Soldato
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19 Oct 2002
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I feel thick even posting this but i am struggling to format my new custom built win xp pc. It's an Insurance Mandate replacement and is surprisingly properly cuistom built. However, i now need to format it and the last time i formatted a computer was good ole Win 98 which was the simple affair of
Enter DOS/Format C:/Are You Sure Y or N?/Y!

No longer the case, now i understand the way to do it on XP is to force it to boot from CD, however this PC doesn't give me the option and it loads into Win XP too quickly for me to see any message saying Press F12/Del to enter setup etc.

So currently i am unable to format this PC which has one complete and utter boot of a self replicating virus which won't go away and 5 different programs can't completely eradicate.

Ocuk, i need your help :(

Please note i have tried pressing Del/F12 during startup to no joy :(
 
Another BIOS entry option might be F10.

Otherwise, unplug your keyboard! Chances are you will get a "keyboard not found, press F1 to continue!" error. You can then plug your keyboard back in and see what the screen says.
 
You could also run the winXP CD from windows and force a fresh install as opposed to upgrade.

Will it boot with a floppy? If so make a floppy boot disk from within windows and place the format command, MSCDEX.exe a dos driver for your CD rom and fdisk on it. You will need to create/modify config.sys and autoexec.bat to load the CD driver at boot. Boot with the floppy and if format fails to see the C:\ drive use fdisk to delete the (unknown) NTFS partition. Run winnt from the XP cd i386 folder, to install.

Use Autoruns.exe from sysinternals website after booting in safe mode to see which programs/drivers/services are being run at startup and find where and how the virus re-infects. attempt to delete the start up settings for the virus and the files that are referenced whilst in safe mode.

If you can identify but not delete the infected files/virus whilst in safe mode check running processes with Sysinternals process explorer then kill any process acessing the files and try again download NTFS for DOS from sysinternals to READ NTFS partitions under DOS by booting from floppy and running NTFS for DOS

Do you know the name of the virus that is re-infecting? if so there maybe a free removal tool available from one of the major AV suppliers
 
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