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Help! Sister's computer messed up!
So it seems as soon as I go of to college, my sisters managed to screw up their computer.
They had a pretty awful virus, some Windows Police Pro crap that prevented them from running anything. Taking about an hour and a half, I managed to walk my mom through the steps of taskkilling the program, running a registry fix to allow you to run files, and then scanning in Malwarebytes.
She said the scan completed successfully and that it needed to be rebooted.
The problem is, when she rebooted it, it apparently kept popping up an error about **** isn't a valid Windows image, etc. She could eventually log on to one of the accounts (including the brand new VirusBuster account I made), but it kept giving errors for every single running task, and it would repeat them indefinitely. On top of that, she couldn't run anything anymore, even antivirus software.
So I'm kinda not sure what to have them do now. If possible I'd like to avoid a clean installation since my sisters have a lot of school projects and such on there and they still have school, etc.
I had my mom try "sfc /scannow", but that didn't work - she said the command prompt wouldn't let her type anything and typing the command in Run just opened sfc.exe, not the actual scanner. Another problem is that since it's an HP, they just have recovery discs and not an actual XP Disc.
I have an XP Pro disc she could use for repair installing, but their computer is XP Home, and I'd think that wouldn't work. Opening a recovery console worked from my Pro disc, but what is there to do? You can't do a system file check - what else would "fix" Windows?
So if anybody has any bright ideas, please let me know. I'm supposed to call my mom back tomorrow or Tuesday and let her know what I find out, but as of now I'm as clueless as she is.
Here's someone having similar errors:
The only difference is with these guys, the errors go away and they can still run stuff; on their computer it doesn't.
Thanks for the help!
They had a pretty awful virus, some Windows Police Pro crap that prevented them from running anything. Taking about an hour and a half, I managed to walk my mom through the steps of taskkilling the program, running a registry fix to allow you to run files, and then scanning in Malwarebytes.
She said the scan completed successfully and that it needed to be rebooted.
The problem is, when she rebooted it, it apparently kept popping up an error about **** isn't a valid Windows image, etc. She could eventually log on to one of the accounts (including the brand new VirusBuster account I made), but it kept giving errors for every single running task, and it would repeat them indefinitely. On top of that, she couldn't run anything anymore, even antivirus software.
So I'm kinda not sure what to have them do now. If possible I'd like to avoid a clean installation since my sisters have a lot of school projects and such on there and they still have school, etc.
I had my mom try "sfc /scannow", but that didn't work - she said the command prompt wouldn't let her type anything and typing the command in Run just opened sfc.exe, not the actual scanner. Another problem is that since it's an HP, they just have recovery discs and not an actual XP Disc.
I have an XP Pro disc she could use for repair installing, but their computer is XP Home, and I'd think that wouldn't work. Opening a recovery console worked from my Pro disc, but what is there to do? You can't do a system file check - what else would "fix" Windows?
So if anybody has any bright ideas, please let me know. I'm supposed to call my mom back tomorrow or Tuesday and let her know what I find out, but as of now I'm as clueless as she is.
Here's someone having similar errors:
The only difference is with these guys, the errors go away and they can still run stuff; on their computer it doesn't.
Thanks for the help!
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