yaro137 said:
Truth, the were some trojans and viruses before I finally renewed
the license for my Symantec NIS but after a sucessful renewal,
when I scheduled a full scan on system boot-up I just cannot log
in anymore. I tried as admin, also tried in safe mode. Whatever
I do I'm being logged off stright after the system authenticates my
passwords.
Is there a way around it. I hope I won't have to reinstall
everything. Thanks for any help
Shenan said:
It's unlikely that it is clean and/or fully functional and the
amount of time/effort it would take to get it that way (and the
fact that you would not be 100% sure everything was right with it)
prompts me to suggest a full format/install anew.
I am guessing you have tried logging in as the actrual user
"administrator" in safe mode in one of these attempts you mention?
You could try a repair installation - but I believe - in the end,
even if that gets you back in - you should backup and install fresh.
You can still backup now - you would just need an external hard
disk drive (or internal physical drive other than the one Windows
is installed upon now) and an imaging applicatiojn like Ghost,
TrueImage, BootItNG, etc... Then you backup everything, install
fresh and use the utilities that should come with the software you
chose (verify you can do this before formatting) to read inside the
image file(s) and get the data you need (documents, emails, etc.)
How to Perform a Windows XP Repair Install
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
How to perform an in-place upgrade (reinstallation) of Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315341
Well, I tried as a user (admin) and Administrator (admin). None
worked. If I do the backup say with Ghost won't I get exactly the same
thing
with viruses on it?
Oh and BTW do you mean running Ghost by connecting the hard drive
with the damaged system to another PC?
I believe we have a misunderstanding here.
The users name is "administrator". In Safe Mode - you should type in the
username "administrator" and put whatever password (if any) that user was
assigned. In a default installation from some of the larger computer
manufacturer's - that would be no password at all - leabving the password
field blank. Since you are utilizing Windows XP Professional - you do not
have to go into safe mode to log on as said user - you can simply press
CTRL+ALT+DEL twice to get the classic logon prompt and key in
"administrator" (without the quotation marks) as the usrname and if you
don't recall setting a password for that user, leave the password field
blank and logon. I am not talking about being a member of a group
(administrators) here - but the actual username.
Also - yes - you would be backing up 'viruses and all' - but I did not say
to restore that image - I said to pick files and such that you need out of
said image using the utilities that they provide to access the files inside
the images - which should not include executables that you would run, but
documents you have written, pictures you would like to save, etc.
You could image the drive/partition by putting it into another machine -
sure. But most of the good image utilities allow you to create bootable
media sets that you can utilize to boot with and image the drive/partitions
on the drive without booting into another OS.
Also - as I said - you could still do the repair install given you have the
Windows XP media. That might get you to a state where you can log on,
manually copy the files (documents, foavorites, pictures, spreadsheets, etc)
to external media and then format/install anew - copying your backed up
files to the new install when done.
The point is to get the files you really need off the machine (I suppose you
do not do periodic backups of your stuff now - so you could just fall back
on those) so you can rebuild it in a clean and definitely
not-infested/infected state and then put your stuff that you really did not
want to lose (but did not backup before periodically for whatever reason)
back on it.
