My neighbor's computer recently contracted a serious case of spyware and viruses so I formatted the machine and reinstalled Windows XP Pro. I installed AVG antivirus, Spybot, and Office. They also play party poker on their machine a lot so they installed it after I left.
This morning (the next day) I got a call from them saying that their machine wouldn't boot up. This is where it gets tricky and very, very confusing.
The first time I tried to boot up getting past the BIOS took like 2 minutes while it "Autodetected." After it autodetected it booted up fine. I shut the machine down and tried to turn it on again. This time it flew through the BIOS and gave me a "Insert valid system disk." error before launching Windows (as if it couldn't find the harddisk). I tried simply rebooting a couple times to see if I could get back into Window$.
While rebooting it gave me a few of the ol', "DISK BOOT FAILURE" errors. A couple times it started loading Windows but gave me an error saying Windows couldn't start because hal.dll (or something of that nature) was corrupted or missing. Once, it got into Windows but promptly after logging in I got a blue screen of death.
In short, what is going on? Is the hard disk bad? Is the memory bad? Did the BIOS improperly reconfigure itself? Before the machine got blasted with spyware it worked great.
Should I even bother trying to reinstall Windows? If anybody could shed some light on this I would really appreciate it. I can't pinpoint anything that would cause this behavior with the exception of hardware malfunction. Thanks in advance, - Jeff Jensen
http://www.jeffreyljensen.com
This morning (the next day) I got a call from them saying that their machine wouldn't boot up. This is where it gets tricky and very, very confusing.
The first time I tried to boot up getting past the BIOS took like 2 minutes while it "Autodetected." After it autodetected it booted up fine. I shut the machine down and tried to turn it on again. This time it flew through the BIOS and gave me a "Insert valid system disk." error before launching Windows (as if it couldn't find the harddisk). I tried simply rebooting a couple times to see if I could get back into Window$.
While rebooting it gave me a few of the ol', "DISK BOOT FAILURE" errors. A couple times it started loading Windows but gave me an error saying Windows couldn't start because hal.dll (or something of that nature) was corrupted or missing. Once, it got into Windows but promptly after logging in I got a blue screen of death.
In short, what is going on? Is the hard disk bad? Is the memory bad? Did the BIOS improperly reconfigure itself? Before the machine got blasted with spyware it worked great.
Should I even bother trying to reinstall Windows? If anybody could shed some light on this I would really appreciate it. I can't pinpoint anything that would cause this behavior with the exception of hardware malfunction. Thanks in advance, - Jeff Jensen
http://www.jeffreyljensen.com