R
Robert Pitney
My father-in-law recently obtained the W32.Swen.A@mm
virus that brought his Windows XP Home PC to its knees.
Over the phone, I guided him through the removal
instructions as posted on the Symantec web site.
Unfortunately, he could not get the removal tool because
of a lack of an Internet connection. After making the
changes to the registry of the machine, he went to reboot
and Windows failed to boot. I told him to put in his
Windows XP Home CD and reinstall Windows XP with
the "repair" option.
The problem is that the repair option hangs the PC when
it is installing hardware. It asks for a file
viaagp1.sys, which my father-in-law did not know how to
get, so he skipped the file and setup hangs about 2
minutes later. I now have the PC in my possession and
have repeated the same process, but this time I fed it a
viaagp1.sys file downloaded from the Via web site. The
machine still hangs before setup completes.
Here's the problem: I cannot do a F&R or a normal
Windows XP setup on this PC because this PC is the main
PC for a church and there are lots of critical documents
in the My Documents folders of various users. I suspect
that there is a good Windows install sitting below the
surface, but some flag at bootup makes it go backup into
setup with the "setup is being restarted" screen. I have
tried to boot into safe mode with networking to see if I
can at least copy the critical files off of the PC to
another machine so I can do a full install, but I keep
getting a message the setup cannot run in safe mode and
the PC reboots to the "setup is being restarted screen".
I feel like I am in a catch-22 loop here and my Internet
searches on how to stop the setup program from restarting
at bootup have come up with nothing. Can someone please
help me? I want to either find a way to make the repair
install go to completion without hanging on the hardware
portion of setup -OR- a way that will let me boot into
safe mode with networking to copy the critical data off
of the PC and I will then do a F&R. Can either of these
be done, or is this church's data SOL? BTW, file system
format is NTFS.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
virus that brought his Windows XP Home PC to its knees.
Over the phone, I guided him through the removal
instructions as posted on the Symantec web site.
Unfortunately, he could not get the removal tool because
of a lack of an Internet connection. After making the
changes to the registry of the machine, he went to reboot
and Windows failed to boot. I told him to put in his
Windows XP Home CD and reinstall Windows XP with
the "repair" option.
The problem is that the repair option hangs the PC when
it is installing hardware. It asks for a file
viaagp1.sys, which my father-in-law did not know how to
get, so he skipped the file and setup hangs about 2
minutes later. I now have the PC in my possession and
have repeated the same process, but this time I fed it a
viaagp1.sys file downloaded from the Via web site. The
machine still hangs before setup completes.
Here's the problem: I cannot do a F&R or a normal
Windows XP setup on this PC because this PC is the main
PC for a church and there are lots of critical documents
in the My Documents folders of various users. I suspect
that there is a good Windows install sitting below the
surface, but some flag at bootup makes it go backup into
setup with the "setup is being restarted" screen. I have
tried to boot into safe mode with networking to see if I
can at least copy the critical files off of the PC to
another machine so I can do a full install, but I keep
getting a message the setup cannot run in safe mode and
the PC reboots to the "setup is being restarted screen".
I feel like I am in a catch-22 loop here and my Internet
searches on how to stop the setup program from restarting
at bootup have come up with nothing. Can someone please
help me? I want to either find a way to make the repair
install go to completion without hanging on the hardware
portion of setup -OR- a way that will let me boot into
safe mode with networking to copy the critical data off
of the PC and I will then do a F&R. Can either of these
be done, or is this church's data SOL? BTW, file system
format is NTFS.
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!