I think I may have a virus.

[tivaelydoc1]

On my mothers computer, when she turns it on, it goes through all the normal settings and starts to load windows and right before it goes to the login screen, it just restarts. She has windows xp home. When I turn on the computer, it doesn't allow me to press any F keys.

 

[Rudster8161]

even F8 to get into the boot menu? if not while its starting up(the little bar moving across) turn off the computer, that will make the boot menu come up because windows didnt start properly, than boot into safe mode than run anti-virus, if you dont have any boot into safe mode with networking and google housecall, its an online virus scan.

 

[tivaelydoc1]

Yea F8 doesn't work and when I loaded safe mode, it went thru the regular steps and when it loaded windows, it just restarted again.

 

[tivaelydoc1]

It turns out that DEL goes to the boot settings. I put the hard drive first, saved, and then restarted, but it still doesn't work.

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Most likely, it's a virus if your PC keeps rebooting like that. Insert the XP installation CD and enter setup mode. Choose the recovery option and boot to the DOS command line. Execute the command "FIXMBR" and reboot. The "FIXMBR" command re-initializes the MBR with NTLDR.

 

[D-Lew]

Yeah, unplug the hard drive before you boot and see what happens.

I had to do that once because for some reason it refused to boot from the Windows CD.

 

[setishock]

It's a corrupted boot file. Try what ISOwner suggested and go from there.

 

[tivaelydoc1]

Do I have to set the CD player as number one on the boot sequence? It's 2 right now. This is a quote from my mother:
"I boot it to cd choose recovery only option is windows i cant type
anything then it starts rebooting over and over cant boot from windows only
other choice reinstall"
What do I do now?


EDIT: She says there is a option for floppy recovery, which I assume would be if you had the MBR on a floppy, but I have no clue where to get that.

 

[tivaelydoc1]

My mom says the only option is boot to windows, will that work instead of DOS?

 

[tivaelydoc1]

Lol, my mom didn't know what DOS looked like, but when I went over there and fixed the MBR and as soon as I restarted the computer, it just did the same thing.



EDIT:I hate to triple post, but do you think it could be a messed up NTLDR file?