Ok, ridiculously long story, as short as I can make it... After a horrific 4 days of trying to get AVG to work on my Dell, I eventually ended up with some virus that is now eating my system files (bootmgr, registry, driver files.... you name it.). I've rebuilt the bcd, mbr, etc only to have this virus destroy it again. I did a complete wipe of AVG with their removal tool, so I don't have any av software installed on the bad drive. I can no longer access my C: drive to do a wipe and reinstall win7. Bios sees the drive and diagnostics still gives hardware a pass. But when I get recovery console running, it says I have no C: and asks for drivers to be installed. I made both a DVD and USB stick for recovery. Both are bootable IF i remove my SATA drive from boot seq in BIOS setup. otherwise it ignores them and tries to boot C:, then fails with a "corrupted registry" error that loops. It seems the recoveries don't have the drivers and registry files I need to replace in my system to get C: to mount. Does anyone have any ideas how I can salvage this steaming hot mess? PLEASE NOTE: Any suggested solutions need to be free and applied in DOS. tia, Aja
I just spend yesterday fixing a laptop that seems to be very similar you yours.... Fix that I used. 1. Removed the Harddrive.... 2. attached to a GOOD working computer. 3. Once you hook up be patient and allow it to open. 4. Your Virus Scanner should scan an disable the Virus... I used MSE... 5. Only the reserve partition was originally seen..... I did open CMD and used Diskpart to FORMAT "Reserve Partition" 99MB 6. I then opened My Computer again an see "Unallocated Space" as Local Disk 7. Had to move to Manage Disk and give a Drive Number-Name. 8. moved back to and Formatted via Cmd. 9. inserted back into Laptop ...Boot to Restore Disk to Restore BACK to Default. Now the customer used AVG so it failed.... to catch this or else SHE allowed it in.
Hiren's CD is doing the trick! Thank you so much for suggesting it. Don't know why everyone doesn't have this. Thank you pokerface and god bless Hiren!!!
I have been using Hiren;s boot CD for many years. If you didn't sign up for email notifications, then check back to the site occasionally, as the disc is updated regularly with new & updated tools
1. Boot into a Live linux distribution (since windows viruses doesn't work on Linux) 2. Scan the hdd with an antivirus tool for linux (optional). 3. Backup all you important files to BD/DVD/HDD/Flash (I recommend not to backup any applications since they can be infected). 4. Use one of the tools provided in HBCD, UBCD or other to format the hard disk I made a flash drive with HBCD, UBCD, Windows XP and Windows 7 installations and BackTrack. It's very practical since I use them on daily bases.