netbook blue screen of death virus attack

[darknkreepy3#]

I repaired two netbooks, one was a funky Acer netbook ZG5 and another was ees or something to that nature. Both had windows XP Home and I could not enter windows under any circumstances, safe mode, command prompt, etc. Luckily I had a few free USB keys, and I found "Hiren's Boot CD 10.1" along with a page on the site linking to software to make the CD ISO work bootable onto the usb key. Both netbooks could boot fine from the USB key.

Here's the catch, the AFT+F10 method for the ZG5 doesn't work for this specific Acer model, maybe due to a virus, physical hard drive damage or corruption. The user also had an 8gb sdhc card that would not read, format, anything even low level for whatever damaging occurrence that fell upon it. This made me think the user themselves had not just gotten a virus, but something moreso their own fault. I noticed that the netbook also had leftover chunk files, 000,001,002,003 etc...

So, I found a way online to make a usb key bootable and copy XP with SP3 on it, with partial auto installation, as the installer asked questions to automate it. Usually I like the by hand approach, but this was fine, as it took so long to get to this point as is.

After installing windows and updating it, there were no drivers to be found on acer's site, so I found a support site just for the netbooks! It had all the drivers, and poof all went well.

The second computer, I just ran mini Windows XP, copied all user docs from c:\Documents and Settings\*****\ as * implies user name to an external USB drive. Note that you have to install usb drives before booting via usb key to mini windows xp on hiren's boot "cd" (usb key). It is just a watered down version of XP like a linux preview install from CD to ram, as the mini xp drive is a ram drive. I ran some tools like kaspersky, and it barely found the virii. So, I just restarted, pressed ALT+F9 on this netbook, and a Ghost of the C drive was restored.

*note on larger ees notebook, I had to go into bios with F2 and tell it in BOOT that the boot drive HDD was the usb key not the internal drive. This also made working in recovery mode command prompt impossible because the real C drive disappeared. Just remember to set up the boot from USB key, and the key is the "first hard drive (- + in bios interface) and voila you can run mini windows xp, hiren etc. After that you have to restore to the real internal drive as the first har d drive and the one you will boot from, or windows will not install properly form USB key with the approach I found.