Hello
A friend brought me her computer which would no longer load into Windows. Its a Dell E521 with 3 GB RAM and 512 hard drive. The hard drive failed about a year ago and was replaced. The computer has run fine since.
It runs Microsoft Vista and she had installed the paid version of Avast some time ago.
Her hard drive was partitioned into C:, E: and F: and the C: partition (about 100 GB) was almost full, so she asked about taking some of the free space from E: and merging it with C:
I recommended the free disk partitioner "Easeus Partition Magic" which I have used many times. She installed it and I walked her through the changes she wanted to make. She was able to repartition the drive, and successfully rebooted the computer into Vista. She opened her Outlook and was in the process of sending me an email to report her success when the computer crashed.
She had to shut it off by holding in the power button. After that, Windows would not load.
She is fairly computer literate, so I had her boot into the Troubleshooting menu (the Safe Mode menu). Booting into Safe Mode gave the same problem. The computer would boot, then begin to load Windows, then go to an all-black screen with only a white cursor arrow. She could move the arrow around the screen, but anything she tried to click on (either left or right click) produced no response.
The computer would not continue to load Windows past this point and all attempts to CTRL+Alt+Del or other keyboard functions were ignored. The only way to shutdown the computer was to hold in the power button.
When she brought me the computer, I tried "Last Known Good Configuration" and all of the other options in the Troubleshooting menu, but each gave the same results. The only difference was that booting into Safe Mode gave a black screen with a larger white cursor arrow, indicating that the screen was at the lower resolution of Safe Mode.
I was able to boot the computer successfully using a Linux Live CD (Puppy Linux) and was able to read the Windows partition and see the files there.
I booted the computer with her Windows install disk, and chose "Repair". The automatic Repair function started, but took forever to run and I finally gave up and rebooted.
This time I ran chkdsk /f from the Command Prompt in the Repair section. Checkdisk found hundreds of errors, which it fixed and reported no other problems. When I rebooted with the Repair disk and re-ran the automatic Repair it completed in a few minutes, reporting there were no errors.
I rebooted the computer normally, and it got to a black screen with a white cursor and froze.
I rebooted the computer to the Troubleshooting menu and selected "Enable boot logging", which makes a text file in the Windows folder showing the boot progress.
Restarting the computer with Linux I was able to read the boot log file ... the last entry was :
"Unable to load C:\Program Files\Alwil Software\Avast5\ng\vbox\vboxaswdrv.sys"
Using Linux I found that file and renamed it, hoping that if the computer couldn't find it, it would just skip over it.
Rebooting the computer gave the same problem: black screen with white cursor, nothing else.
I searched Google for that filename and eventually came to the Forums here. Not seeing that exact problem mentioned, I decided to install the latest Avast free onto my own computer, and copy the vboxaswdrv.sys file from it to her computer. If the problem was that the file had somehow gotten corrupted, this might fix it.
After copying the file, I rebooted her computer and got the same problem.
It was getting late, so I decided to shut it all down for the day. When I tried to turn off my computer (Windows 7) it would not shutdown! It acted like it was going to, but then just froze up and sat there showing the Desktop.
I had to power it off to shut it down.
As I had read on the Forum of others having this problem, I rebooted my computer, downoaded the Avast clear uninstaller tool, uninstalled Avast and reinstalled Windows Security Essentials. The computer is fine again and I'm using it right now to type this.
I have used the free versions of Avast almost exclusively over the years, and always recommended it to anyone who would listen. Only in the last year have I had to uninstall it. Whenever new virus definitions came out, Avast would notify me that it needed to be updated, but would not do it without me actually telling it to.
It would not just go ahead and update itself on its own. I got tired of the nagging, so switched to Security Essentials, which keeps itself updated without nagging me.
Sorry for the long post, but it was necessary so that you could understand the situation her computer is in.
I have finally decided to reinstall Vista into another partition (which completed successfully) and the computer is running the Windows updates now.
The new installation cannot access the old Vista partition for some reason, but I can use Linux to move her files from the old partition to the new one.
At this point, I cannot say for sure that Avast is the cause of her problems, but the failure to boot past the Avast entry in the boot log is suspect. I cannot determine what caused the computer to crash in the first place, but I am suspecting that perhaps the Avast she had on the computer did an automatic update behind the scenes, and this update is incompatible with the computer somehow.
As I can't boot into the old partition, I cannot remove Avast to prove or disprove this suspicion.
Is there a way to remove or disable the Avast installation in the old Vista partition?
I have even taken the extra steps of manually replacing the registry hives with older versions. In Vista, in the System32\config folder, there are current hives, and also copies of earlier hives, such as "Default" and "Default_previous", "SAM" and "SAM_previous" etc. I have renamed all the old hives, and then replaced them with the "previous" versions, but when booting the computer I get the same problem as originally ... black screen with white cursor only.
Is there anyway to remove Avast from a Windows partition that won't load?
thanks
