Help needed. Virus?

[checjb]

Hi all,
Right then, I have a nice little problem for you all to have a think about. Sorry if this is the wrong forum but I wasn't really sure where to put it.

OK. A friend of mine was experiencing all sorts of problems with his PC about a month ago. He was unable to open any programs when in Windows and loads times were ~30 mins from power on the being able to use the START button in Windows. Now I solved that problem using an old Ghost image. Unfortuantely I also burnt a few files to DVD-RW, then forgot about them. At the weekened I found that DVD, popped it into my DVD-RW and although Nero could identify the fact that a sessions had been written onto the disk I couldn't see any files in Windows Explorer or anyhthing else. Since then my PC has died. I cannot access my WinXP partition as HAL.DLL has been erased (apparently) and I cannot get Win98 to start up.
I set my BIOS to ignore my new main hardrives and added it a clea, FAT32 HD and then tried to install a clean copy of Win98. So far that installation process has been running for 3 days!
Any ideas folks? Is this a virus? I assume so as I haven't changed any hardware but I can't see how to remove any nasties when I can't access a single antivirus program...or even an OS.

Help me Obi-Wan etc.

Cheers

Chris.

 

[Werewolf]

if it's happening at the OS installation stage then it is very unlikely to be a virus.

My first thought would be, damn you're patient 3 days for it to install
My second thought would be to check the hard drives, try another CD/DVD drive to install from, and check the memory is working ok (memtest86).

If it's massively slow when you're installing the OS it's really got to be down to hardware of some kind in my opinion, as at that point you're not using the installed version of windows that may have been affected by a virus.

 

[checjb]

Werewolf,

Thanks for the quick response. That's one of the best things about OcUK; you put a question up and answers come back in minutes. I love this place.

Anyway, I agree it is probably hardware but I'm stuck to understand what it could be. I have chopped and changed the DVD drives, isolated each hard drive and tried Win98 and WinXP. I think I'll get out my trusty Ultimate Boot CD and try running MemTest to see if that helps. In the mean time I'm going to build up another PC from spares as my broadband was activated on Monday and I'm missing out on all the high-speed goodness.

Thanks

C.

 

[vanandjuanunited]

Check your mobo or could be the ribbon cables are faulty etc.

 

[Ruhbarb]

hi
Just to say your problem probably is hardware, but with broadband be carefull when installing without a firewall.

I installed Windows XP unpatched and in the five minutes it took to firewall I got infested with a host of spyware and a virus!