System Hijacked by virus/malware -- how to restore factory settings?

[Ford_Racing]

Hello everyone!

Last night, my windows 7 got hijacked by a virus/malware program. Whenever I try to boot it, I get as far as the log-in screen then I get a Blue Screen saying FATAL_SYSTEM_ERROR. I can still run in safe mode, however it runs EXTREMELY slow! I believe that the virus/malware program is sucking all of my memory because I have 4GB installed, but only 256MB is free. I do have my installation disk for windows 7: home premium and I tried booting up using CD-ROM, but nothing comes up. I heard that I have to wait longer, but haven't had any free time to try again. Is there any way I can restore factory settings without using the installation CD? Maybe through BIOS?

Thanks!

 

[Adamm07x]

Go to your bios, and make sure that you Set your bios to boot from cd and not primary hard disk. Also if you have made any backups to an external///network drive you can boot from safe mode and use the backup utility.

 

[Ford_Racing]

So I can boot with my Windows 7: Home Edition CD even though the CD Key has been used already?

 

[house70]

Yes, you will be able to boot like that. The key has nothing to do with it. If you decide to re-install the OS that's when you'll need it.
If you decide to go that way - which I would recommend - dont just format the drive; zero it using something like killdisk bootable CD. You can d/l that on a different PC and burn a bootable CD. Formatting is almost never enough to get rid of nasty malware.

 

[Ford_Racing]

I went to killdisk.com and I will download KillDisk Suite and put it on this PC. If someone doesn't mind making a guide or telling me step-by-step on how to use it, that would be fantastic! I'm not the best with using programs like these

EDIT: I downloaded killdisk. Do I run Bootable Disk Creator, Active KillDisk for Windows, or Active KillDisk for DOS?

 

[ohiou_grad_06]

First off, before reformatting, try this. Hit F8 before the windows loading screen to get to options for safe mode. Boot into safe mode with networking. See if it allows you to download and install malware bytes, update that if possible, run a full scan, remove everything it finds. Same thing for spybot search and destroy. After that, install avast antivirus, or avg. Update, boot into normal windows, run full scan of superantispyware, and after, run a full av scan. This should get you pretty well clean. After that, I would run all updates, defrag, and then clean registry and temp files using ccleaner.

If you are set to reformat and want to do a zero wipe, I would say go here.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

Download the iso, which is for ultimate boot cd, grab a program such as imgburn, burn that image on the disc, boot to said disc, and instead of using kill disk, I prefer Darik's boot and nuke. It will actually allow you to do a wipe to Department of Defense standards, which is a 7 pass zero write.