My PC is fvcked....

[NewMan]

So - I had all of these pop-up ads on my PC. tried re-installing windows XP - to no avail. They somehow were still on my PC.

So in a moment of madness I started deleting random crap from my PC - just trying to get rid of the Ad wear.

Anyway - I ended up re-partitioning my hard drive and reformatting it.

Now - Windows XP will not load up. It copies the XP fiels to the hard drive - then when restarting the PC to continue the instalation - nothing happens....

thoughts? any ideas of what wrong here?

 

[TyTe`EyEs]

I don't know where you live, but here there are quite a few small businesses that fix computers. A while back I downloaded some software and my computer went to sh1t. I took it to a small shop and they cleaned it for about 70 bucks. It was well worth it.

 

[MetalFortress]

Do you have a PC by any particular company or a custom PC?

My sister's PC is an eMachines, and has a system restore disk with Windows and other stock software included. She had so many trojans and spyware, that I ended up using the restore disk to format the hard drive and reinstall Windows. The first thing I did on her comp was download Sygate Personal Firewall, FireFox, AdAware SE, Microsoft AntiSpyware, Spybot Search and Destroy, and PeerGuardian, and install all of them. I then had Sygate block MS Internet Explorer altogether. Now, it takes maybe 30 seconds longer, if even that, at startup, but her computer is a fortress that absolutely doesn't let spyware in.

 

[diablo]

Originally posted by NewMan
thoughts? any ideas of what wrong here?

My guess would be this:

Originally posted by NewMan
So in a moment of madness I started deleting random crap from my PC - just trying to get rid of the Ad wear.

Sounds like you may need to slave the original hard drive (#1) to another machine (#2) and copy the files you absolutely have to have from 1 to 2. Then put #1 back in your computer, reinstall Windows, and copy the files back from 2. Just another reason why deleting random crap isn't a very good idea...

 

[Doc73]

I had a similar problem with my machine. What happened was that I went to a certain website (no it was not porn) and all of a sudden I got a bunch of programs installed and my browser shut down. What happened next was probably the most irritating session of troubleshooting I have ever went through. I eventually deleted both my xp partition and then eventually my 2k server partition and reformatted my computer. Except when I reformatted and reinstalled windows, the viruses actually survived the reformat. I deleted and reinstalled xp again, but this time I disconnected myself from the internet, then once windows booted up again I enabled the firewall, plugged the internet back in then as soon as I did that I went to microsof to get the security patches. So far so good

From the sounds of it, I can suggest two things. One is repartition and reinstall windows xp, doing what I did above, or you can do what is called a low level format. A low level format more or less remarks the beginning and end of the sectors on a hard or floppy drive. Whereas files can still be recovered on a normal format, nothing survives a low level format.

Oh yeah, and in case it wasnt mentioned enough, deleting random files on windows xp can be bad. If you are going to screw around with the actual windows files, make sure you create a restore point.

 

[NewMan]

Thanks for the replies.

this is what was wrong if anyone is interested.


So XP would not install - when the install procedure rebooted my PC it would just die.

After trying all kinds fo things - re-partition of hard drive, re format of hard drive etc. I did a check disk - and it came out that my hard drive was OK.

Well, My friend had a 10Gig hard drive laying around so I decided to hook that up and try and install. Worked 1st time.

So basically - I went out and purchased a new hard drive - Fry's has a great deal - 160 Gig for $50.

problem solved.