System won't boot, just reloads endlessly part way into the load routine.

[!Allen Lasting]

Hi,

My friend's wife's computer started acting funny a couple of weeks ago, and
it gradually got worse. From talking on the phone it sounded like a virus
in a restore point, but by the time he got around to looking at it, it would
no longer boot at all. Somehow she had managed to get it to boot and could
get some online time before it rebooted so she just used it that way until
it stopped booting altogether.
So now it's on my dining room table.

Here's what I did so far:
Tried normal boot. No Go.
Tried to get it to come up in Safe Mode. No Go.
Tried to get it to come up from last known good restore point. No go.
Set it to boot from the A drive and got to a dos prompt with a dos system
disk.
Got vcleaner on a floppy from Grissoft's web site, and tried to run it. No
luck, it won't run from a dos prompt.
I have an old 500 MB hard drive with win98 on it. Took the XP drive out,
and set the system up using win98.
Put the XP drive back in as a Slave hoping I could run Vcleaner on the slave
drive. No luck because
the XP drive doesn't show up in My Computer. I guess it's because 98 is Fat
32 and XP is NTFS so 98 can't see it.

Which is the end of the line for me. I don't know what else to do. Can
anybody give me some advice on how to
proceed? Due to the time involved in re-loading XP, all her software, and
loosing all her data files, I'd rather
fix it if I can, or take it to somebody who could, if I can't, so I don't
have to deal with "you lost all my files!"

TIA for any ideas,

Al

 

[Thane of Lochaber]

You might try installing XP over itself, making sure you choose to do an
upgrade install. That way it should keep your existing files and settings.
If you can get into Windows the first thing to do before you go online is
run a virus scanner. The computer rebooting shortly after going online could
be a sign that you have the blaster worm on your system. I posted a link
below where you can download a tool to clean it. Before going online be sure
to turn on the Windows Firewall (right click your connection, properties,
and click the advanced tab).
If you manage to get it working and cleaned up be sure to visit Windows
Update and download any available critical updates.

If nothing else works there are utilities that allow you to read NTFS
partitions from Windows 98. See the second link for information.

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.blaster.worm.removal.tool.html

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfsdos.shtml

Good luck

 

[!Allen Lasting]

Hi Thane,

snip
"You might try installing XP over itself, making sure you choose to do an
upgrade install. That way it should keep your existing files and settings."

Is this the same as doing a repair install?

Alan