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W2K Bootup

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by luvsbooks

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I have 2 HP computers and 1 DEll that are all running W2K Professional and all 3 get to the "starting" Windows point where you can press F8 for troubleshooting and they ALL stop booting up and sit at that screen for hours. I've reloaded the operating system, reformatted and even changed out the memory. No luck!! Does anyone have any ideas of what can be wrong?

9 replies

by tomf

Very interesting...It is possible you could have a MBR (Master boot record) virus. Did you try booting to a Anti-Virus CD and do a system scan?

Maybe try to boot into the W2K recovery console and once you are logged in type "FIXMBR" this will rewrite the MBR.

I must be honest, I'm not sure if this will work but it is a good place to start.

Maybe also Reset the default in the BIOS settings.

I hope this helps, although I suspect something else is causing these problems, even more interesting that all 3 computers are having this problem.

On a side note: Can you get into Safe mode? Did you recently install any software/hardware?

by waqas_dar

Hmmm...I agree, it certainely looks like a boot virus. I had encountered same type of problem but with Windows 98. The virus name was Spirit. Even changing RAM doesn't help much.
In case of boot viruses, try to reset BIOS settings and then boot with a bootable CD that has anti-virus program on it.
Good Luck.

by chennaitechie

This is surely the great work of some bootvirus. if you have networked the 3 computers then you can safely transfer yourt documents to other computers and then perform a FDISK on each computer one by one on a routine basis. Most bootviruses will be eliminated while peforming FDISK. after finishing up the installation of your programs into the computer just installed, install an antivirus program and update it with the latest virus definitions.(scanning a computer infected with bootvirus may notreturn favourable results.) then connect the second computer and check the computer for viruses and then when you are sure that there is no virus in the documents transfer them back to the original computer and then repeat the steps to all the computers.

by bigfootduck

Boot sector virus, very evil. but it might not b as hard as they make it sound, if u can access the bios interface look around and check to make sure that the boot virus protection is OFF, for some reason, unbeknown to me(college comp guru) it doesn't seem to like that haha, just make sure that it is off, if its on then change it and save, if u cant get to the bios GUI then u can reset the bios by either switching jumpers and clearing CMOS by taking out little battery, this will reset to factory settings

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