I need a little help....

robwolf666 · #1 (**permalink**) 13-10-2008, 11:13 PM

A friend of mine has computer problems, and I was hoping someone might be able to help!?

He says....

Quote:

I was on a site I had been using for years, (vcdquality) I went to check a sample jpg of a movie, and that's when my anti-virus popped up. I rememberred a friend telling me something similar happened to him and he said the browser popped up and told him he may have a virus and to click "here" to correct the problem. He said he clicked cancel, and that's when his problems started.

So instead of clicking cancel, I did a ctrl alt delete, and closed my browser from the task manager. Didn't help I still got nailed by a nasty trojan horse. I had to evacuate all my Freasterns to an external, but they appear safe.

After trying in vane to remove the virus, I decided that there would be a painful loss or two, but nothing I couldn't replace if I really needed it. So I tried to reformat and reload my OS (windows, originally xp mce, but with a disk that's xp pro).

I'm new to SATA, this is my first machine with a SATA drive, but for some backround I tried to install a second ide drive, on the ide cdrom cable and eventhough my bios saw the drive, and looked configured correctly, I could not get to the drive to format or fdisk. (no biggie at the time).

Anyway after screwing up an exe or 2, the next time I restarted the computer I could no longer get to windows. (with the virus, I could load windows, but when ever I opened my broswer (firefox, IE, or Opera), I could not get to any pages with out massive errors. and that stupid popup to go to some anti virus web page to fix the problem.) I was running AVG antivirus, it seemed it was all happy and not screaming for definitions updates but this one snuck up on it. It was not allowed to update definitions after the virus hit.

I tried starting my puter after trying to ID the virus in task manager, and removing it, but all I got was the prequel black screen with the windows logo, and status bar at the bottom, it would freeze in there.

Again, now I said screw it, and tried to reload windows, but right as setup is about to go to the gui screen it errors out, and says something about the pci.sys not being at the right address. I did figure that as long as I was starting over I would add the second drive to the equation as well but that was after I got this error.

When I run BIOS setup, the BIOS sees both drives installed and the cdrw. SATA is master, IDE drive is master on IDE, and CDRW is slave on IDE. I have pulled everything else including the memory, cleared the CMOS, put one of my 2 memory sticks back in, it came back with the same error. I did try to swap my memory sticks one time and it came back and said it could not find the OS (command prompt).

After trying to clear the CMOS a second time I haven't seen that error come back, but I still cant seem to load windows with out that pci.sys error.

I also pulled out my floppy (Windows 98 startup) tried to run FDisk, but for some reason the only thing Fdisk saw was a Ramdrive, about 8G. It was the only drive that showed so I tried to FDisk it, I was able to run that successfully, but it changed nothing when I tried to load windows again.

Sadly my fastest machine is sitting in pieces right now, and I'm wondering if I need to buy a new motherboard or if I can salvage this one. I know this all started with the virus, so I'm having trouble believeing that there is failed hardware, I can't seem to find a way to get to the system tools on the windows xp disk.

Any suggestions?