Virus keeping vista from booting?

[celegorm]

Ok here's the scoop,

I'm working on a laptop for a friend. She said that she was using the comptuer when a random anti-virus popped up saying she had a bunch of viruses and well you know the rest of the story.

Once she rebooted, the system would no longer boot into any form of safe mode (or the other restore/last known good options) but goes right to system startup repair.

At this point I have plugged the drive into my desktop and scanned and removed a few infections but nothing changed. My guess is either A: the virus infection is bad enough to really mess the boot information in Vista beyond my knowledge of repair or B: there is something else wrong with windows that startup repair cannot fix.

Anyone have any ideas? I got the laptop about 3 hours ago, and have another 24 to fix

I should also say manually running startup repair and checkdisk have not worked and the computer is not letting me run sfc while in the recovery mode.

[~Darkseeker~]

Have you tried Bootcfg /rebuild in the recovery console? infections could have corrupted/deleted the boot sector maybe?

sounds like it's probably a rebuild of Windows to me though, get as much of her data off as you can as soon as you can, never know when things might take a turn for the worst.

[fractalr3]

it probably deleted your boot file. you have to re install using cmd.

[JCB]

i would recommend Microsoft Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset (MSDaRT or DaRT) for Vista to recover this. This tool can automatically recover non booting systems, ive used it a few times sucessfully

[celegorm]

I thought I posted in here this morning, guess not...

Dark, I took your suggestion with the bootcfg but that didn't work. Also, that command apperantly doesn't exist in Vista's recovery console and the closes I could find was bootrec /rebuildmbr (or something alone those lines)

Fractalr, the boot file wans't deleted, I wouldn't have been able to pull the safe mode options if it wasn't there.

Thanks for the Idea JCB, I couldn't find a legitimatly free download for that though

I think it's a lost cause. I'm pulling all the data that I can from the drive that she could possibly want before it gets wiped clean. I have one more trick I want to try with sfc but that'll wait until after the data get's backed up.

Just to bump with info, the SFC idea that I had didn't work . I tried plugging the drive into my desktop and usings teh /offbootdir and /offwindir options but it refused.

Data's been pulled so now it's time to reformat. I'll be passing that off to someone else though with summer classes and working two jobs I don't have the time to do a professional job on it