Bios Virus

[NightWing]

03.22.04: Tonight  avast! caught a virus and it asked to reboot my pc because there was a copy of the virus still resident in memory.  Windows system restore was on.  When I tried to reboot my desktop (Dell Dimension 8200 WinXP Pro) my PC seems to enter a never ending loop between the DVD, CD-ROM, keyboard and floppy.  I do not even get any signal sent to my monitor.  I have essentially lost any access to my hard disk.

I removed the battery in the HD to reset the BIOS but this did not help.  I tried to remove my memory (RAMBUS 128MB) but the problem is that I have four banks and RAMBUS memory only works in pairs.  Two slots are occupied with two 64MB sticks.  The other two slots have dummy termination modules. I was hoping to isolate the virus to one of the 64MB sticks but I could not separate them sucessfully.  I created WinXP Pro Setup Disks (six of them) but since I can not get access to the floppy drive they are useless.

Can anybody please suggest any solution to this problem??

Thanks in advance for all your cooperation and suggestions.

-- NightWing

[igor]

Do you remember the name of the virus?

[NightWing]

Sorry I do not.  But it targeted my IE homepage by substituting it with something like qwert_search I believe.  Sorry for being vague.

-- NightWing

[igor]

In that case, it really doesn't sound like a "dangerous" virus that could be the cause of the problems.
Isn't it rather a hardware-related problem, having no connection to the virus? (I don't know... cable problem, or broken disk controller... or something like that).

[NightWing]

Thanks for the suggestion, it forced me to look for other things gone wrong.  As my luck will have it, my monitor is broken.  Luckily I have a spare one.

So this is where I am now,  I now see the system boot up but it is looping before loading the OS.  All I get to choose is between option F2 and F12.  F2 being the BIOS setup and F12 beign Boot Menu.  Does this sound like any virus that you all know?

I used the F12 option to force the PC to boot up from the a: drive.  I tried to use the winXP setup disks, but if I select to repair the windows installation I end up in the never ending loop again.

I only have 26MB of disk space I do not think I can install WinXP in a different partition. If I delete my windows partion and reinstall WinXP would I lose any data in my hard disk?  I think I will not but I need to be sure.  

Thanks again in advance for your support and cooperation.

-- NightWing

[igor]

What kind of "loop" do you mean"? Freeze?
What happens when you try to boot from hard drive? "No system found" error or something like that?

If you delete a disk partition, you will certainly lose all the data on that partition.

[.: Mac :.]

I only have 26MB of disk space

Can you use the CD to repair windows XP installation?

[NightWing]

Thanks for all your responses.

To Igor:
The loop that I meant is as follows:
PC restarts black screen is on, there is a short pause and then a very quick flash ( I mean I had to see three times before making it up) of the word "NTDETECT.EXE failed".  After this I get a screen that gives me an option to select either F2 Setup or F12 Boot menu.  If I do not make a selection the PC keeps cycling between these two screens endlessly.

I never get a chance to boot from the HD since the PC keeps cycling between as described above.

To MacLover2000
Actually the floppies do make you use the CD.  The problem is that in the repair rutine the PC is forced back into the loop that I described to Igor.

[whocares]

Hi,

Did try using the repair console by booting rom the WIN-XP-CD:
especially the commands
Fixboot
 and/or
Fixmbr
might be helpful

are the harddisk(s) recognized in BIOS ? AutoDSetect HD might be worth a try


P.S.: Do I understand this correctly, that you only have 26 MB free on your System partition ? I don't think this will work


can you see the disks/partitions when booting from A: ?
IS there correct size given ?`what says
- Fdisk /status     and
- scandisk /surface ?

[NightWing]

Hi whocares.

The problem that I have is that I can not get direct access to the CD-ROM or DVD drives.  What ever is wrong with my system does not allow me to.  Even after using the WinXP setup disks the c: drive is not recognized.

I should have been clearer about what I meant by "26MB of disk space".  This was not a partition but how much space I had in my 40GB HD.  The current NTFS partition is 39.74GB big, so even if I wanted to make another logical partition I just do not have the space.

03.25.04: I want to extend my most sincere gratitude for all your suggestions.

 I suspect that what happened  to my system is that Master Boot Record (MBR) got corrupted by some virus.   This Microsoft link explains what MBR is in greater detail: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q69/0/13.ASP&NoWebContent=1

I finally decided to overwrite the WinXP installation without formatting and check for viruses with avast!. My goal at this time was simply to gain access to data to copy and then reformat my HD.

I found a comment in another forum similar to this one where someone mentioned that when you remove a partition you do not really lose that data just the connection to it.  One then can use data recovery tools you to retrieve the data.  In my case, since I deleted the partition but not reformatted the HD, I recovered all my data, although all my applications no longer work.

Since this forum was so helpful in coming to my aid I feel obligated to give something back in return.  I understand this is an anti-virus forum so apologize on advance for the following link.  The link points to another forum that taks about how to reinstall WinXP cleanly and efficiently every time.  I hope this may be of help to someone in the future.

The link: http://www.dvdrhelp.com/forum/archive/t200101.html

P.S.: I only read the very first entry, and I intent to follow its recommendation.

-- NightWing