Member Avatar for ROTY

Hey,
This may belong elsewhere, but I thought that I would try it here.

Two weeks ago I picked up a Smitfraud virus that I thought I took care of using norton and spybot. However, a day later my computer completely lost it, and ended up crashing. It got to the point that I could not log into Windows without the computer restarting.

After several days of wrestling with the problem, and even getting my friend (who is a computer programmer by trade) to come in and look at it, we were forced to use the recovery system.

After running the recovery program, I began to reinstall and update programs only for them to respond that they were corrupted. Later that same day my computer began to, once again, restart on its own.

My friend said that it sounded like either my hard drive was failing or the recovery partition was corrupted.

I have ordered recovery discs from HP for Windows XP, however I wanted to know if anyone had any other ideas on how to fix this problem, or how to get rid of the corrupted products that could be causing the failure.

Any help would be great.

Thanks in advance.

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Member Avatar for Serunson

u could try going into safe mode, or has that not been successful?

Member Avatar for ROTY

I did attempt a safe mode run both after the virus infected the computer and after the initial crash. However, I haven't attempted anything in safe mode since running the recovery program. However, I am afraid that will be a dead end (though I am going to try it tomorrow/later today.)

When I ran safe mode after the crash it continued to respond and react just like it did in normal mode, restarting before I could get into windows or right after I logged in.

Member Avatar for dcc

If you are planning on doing a fresh installation of XP I would suggest wiping the drive with a utility like Wipe Drive, this will remove any traces of that virus, a format only removes the file addresses.

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