Trouble with laptop.

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ghostchamber

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 19, 2003
Messages
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Ok, I just had a laptop come to me at work that I need to fix. It's a police laptop, and I'm trying to get it taken care of by tomorrow, and I'd rather not have to reinstall Windows.

Basically, it's a Windows XP pro laptop that is loaded with viruses. It isn't booting up properly. Windows loads, you can log in, but explorer doesn't load, there's no start button and no icons. All that loads is the wallpaper (mind you the wallpaper is a virus warning ... but it's only an image), and booting in safe mode yields the same results. I've already gone through task manager and eliminated as many processes as possible, but still nothing works. Almost evey startup item on msconfig is disabled, except one oddball one called "buritos."

Thoughts? Ideas?
 
Wow. Sounds like a huge mess. I would say backup the data and reinstall XP if you can.
 
To run explorer hit ctrl-alt-del and task manager will show up then goto file - new task - explorer.exe and then just backup what you can and reformat, once you get a virus reformatting is the best way to make sure its gone.
 
I got a $20 virtual dollar bet you cave and re-load Windows. It's hard enough cleaning systems that have spyware and stuff but you can SEE the start button, let alone one THAT bad...

Why the fear of re-loading?
Don't use images? Applications not easy to install packages? tsk tsk! Prepare today, so you can easy re-image and return tomorrow. That's my motto.
 
No fear of reloading, but it turns out he might have some important information on there.

At any rate, explorer.exe not found when I try to run it through task manager.
 
ghostchamber said:
No fear of reloading, but it turns out he might have some important information on there.
Click to expand...
And pulling the "important information" off before you re-image it isn't possible? Everyone has old data they want back that has to be pulled. That's no excuse! This is 2008, it's easy to pull that data off.
 
I just had this same problem. Ran BART-PE off a USB drive and used a USB external hard drive to ghost an image of the machine to the USB external hard drive. Reformat, extract the data from Ghost Explorer.
 
QHalo said:
I just had this same problem. Ran BART-PE off a USB drive and used a USB external hard drive to ghost an image of the machine to the USB external hard drive. Reformat, extract the data from Ghost Explorer.
Click to expand...
Couldn't I just boot off Ghost and put the image on the external from there?
 
You can do that as well. :p

I just use Bart PE because I have it for other things.
 
Try running a repair install off of the Windows CD. It should replace all of the system files, including Explorer.
 
Zero82z said:
Try running a repair install off of the Windows CD. It should replace all of the system files, including Explorer.
Click to expand...

On a system that the OP described, loaded with viruese, the viruses may undo allof the repair install's work.
 
about to do the same thing for a friend.

which live cd do you guys prefer?

would pretty much any of them work? just going to boot up and move his files to an external hard drive then format.
 
Zero82z said:
Try running a repair install off of the Windows CD. It should replace all of the system files, including Explorer.
Click to expand...
I was actually doing that when I left work last night. We'll see how it went when I get there in about 1.5 hours.
 
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