System Crash due to MSBLAST

[Jag]

I am trying to help someone whose system has gone blue screen after a few
days with the MSBlast worm. Initially he got the random shutdown problem
associated with the worm, but yesterday his system crashed and now won't
boot up. The error message is "unmountable boot volume" 0x81F65C08 and
attempting to boot in safe mode or do a recovery of the OS does not work.

What can I do to get his system up so I can run the Blaster removal tool?
Needless to say he has never done a backup of his files and is dreading
having to reformat his drive and reinstall XP Home version.

Running out of ideas,
Joe

 

[mike]

This happened to me also!!
First try to run repair installation from your windows xp
CD. If this does not work which didnt in my case try the
following.
THe way I overcame this is to reformat the harddrive and
reinstall windows. You will however lose all your data.
You will have to back up your data first! HOw if you cant
access windows? THis is a long process but it worked for
me.
In brief you remove the harddrive and install it into
another machine(preferably one with a CD writer) as the
secondary harddrive. YOu boot up the machine as normal and
in windows explorer you should see the secondary
harddrive. Here you can copy all your important data to CD
or to another partition. Once all the data has been copied
you can reformat your harddrive and reinstall windows.

hope this helps!

 

[Jeff Brown[MSFT]]

Jag,

I had to work with a customer that this happened to as well. What we did in their case was to do a parallel install. Which is
to say that you reinstall XP home but you do not reformat the drive and use a different installation directory. From there you
should search for your data files on the drive and then back them up. After that it is up to you if you want to format the drive
and reinstall or just use the new install.

Thanks,
__
Jeff Brown
Microsoft Support Professional
MCSE

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights.
Please reply to the newsgroup so that others may benefit. Thanks!
--------------------