HP Pavilion a350n will not boot

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jenscherer - 30 May 2007 01:03 GMT

My dad said that there was something wrong with the computer- we think
my little brother downloaded a song with a virus attached or
something. Anyways, he took it upon himself to fix it without talking
to me or a professional first. I had mentioned to do a system restore
so all of our files wouldn't be deleted. He talked to someone else
and performed a system recovery without backing up the files first...

Well, he did all of that last night I guess, because I woke up and
found the computer doing a virus scan. It found various adware and
maybe a virus, and then it told me to restart. I restarted and now
the computer will not boot. I cannot boot to regular or safe mode.
When I try to go to safe mode it displays all of this 'multi disc
partition windows system32' stuff....I don't know if he deleted
something important or messed up the hard drive...

I don't want to delete all of our saved files. I need to know if
performing a complete system restore is the onlly remedy to this
problem.

PLEASE HELP!!!

-Jen

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craigm - 30 May 2007 03:12 GMT

> My dad said that there was something wrong with the computer- we think
> my little brother downloaded a song with a virus attached or
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
>
> -Jen

No it is not the only way out, although you may end up doing a full restore.

Three options come to mind.

1) Boot from the recovery TOOLS cd. This is one you made when you got the
computer. It is not the same as the recovery disk. You may be able to fix
the boot issue with it.

2) Boot from a live Windows CD and copy the files to an external HDD. Google
on "BartPE"

3) Boot from a live Linux CD. (Download one that supports reading NTFS
filesystems.) Copy the desired files to an external HDD. Google
on "knoppix" for example.

If you do 2) or 3) you may be able to recover your files, Be aware that you
may also copy the virus with them. Before doing anything with the files on
the external HDD, run a virus scan against them. A spyware check would also
be a good idea.

If the filesystem isn't trashed you may be quite successful copying the
files off the system. To fix the system, you may still need to do a system
recovery. This depends upon what was messed up.

These are not the only solutions. Others may have more suggestions.

craigm

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