Virus ? from thread on free electricity

[ban-all-sheds]

Halfway through loading up windows it re-starts the POST, POST completes and Windows starts to load again. The cycle repeats. No messages or if there are they are not on screen long enough to see them.

Took it to the local expert computer dealer who diagnosed and repaired a corrupted Master Boot Record but declined to offer an opinion on how this corruption had occured. A local geek ( who I would not trust my machine to ) has the opinion that videos with a malicious pay load are becoming more common.

You can do a fair mount of basic problem elimination yourself, before going to a pro.

Make a bootable CD of Knoppix (or a.n.o. Linux if there are others which will run purely from CD). If the PC will boot that then you've ruled out basic h/w & BIOS problems.

And if when booted the HDDs are all spun up and visible then you know that they work, and if you can see all of your files you know that the contents aren't corrupted etc.

In your case that would have made the MBR a likely suspect, and there are free tools you can get which will let you inspect/edit the MBR.

e.g. http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/BootToolsRefs.htm#FREE

Not that this would have been useful this time, but another very handy tool to have is a bootable CD of SpinRite, which can check and fix bad sectors etc. Not free, but not very expensive, and very much worth the money.

 

[bernardgreen]

The reason I took the lazy route and used a repair shop was lack of time ( renovating a 492 year old cottage ) and no real urgent need for the machine as my design work is all on two other PCs. I decided a long time ago that the Internet machine and the work machines would never be connected other than by discs and more recently SD cards.