trackrat Posted January 13, 2007 Report Share Posted January 13, 2007 A friend just asked me to look at his computer.He has installed Steganos antivirus of the cover of Which magazine because his usual AV application asked to be renewed , so they thought they would try a free one.They did not uninstall the old AV and now it boots into windows for a minute and then everytime it goes to the BSOD.I have tried Safe mode but it just bypasses it and goes straight into windows followed by the BSOD.Iam thinking of trying a XP repair following the Powerless guide, as they cannot find there XP CD but the COE number is on the side I should be able to use my CD.Any thoughts welcome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-pops- Posted January 13, 2007 Report Share Posted January 13, 2007 Did they have an XP CD or one of those daft recovery things or, worse, one of those dafter things with almost nothing on them except directions to a hidden partition?Dell and Compaq machines in particular can cause huge problems with reloading the OS from something other than the "approved" system.P.S. from a cockup that Steganos Safe caused on one of my machines a long time ago, I now class their software as dangerous as Norton. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cozofdeath Posted January 13, 2007 Report Share Posted January 13, 2007 Another great thing that ever xp user should have is a live cd. Even if you can boot to a removable disk its still very useful to have. You just set your boot list in the bios to cd/dvd and when the computer boots, in short, it loads the OS on the cd. So everything is run in memory not from the hard drive. That way you have full access to the hard drive even if your computer wont boot. Ultimate Boot CD - http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.htmlBarts PE (Windows Live CD) - http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/These can fix your problem. If you have a rescue cd/dvd that could work to but since there is not GUI it would be hard. A simple registry edit could work to stop the one virus scanner from loading at startup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trackrat Posted January 13, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 13, 2007 A few more pointers as this has me baffled.I booted it up and sure enough it booted into windows then after about 30 seconds the BSOD duly kicked in and it rebooted into a never ending loop.So I disconnected the wireless keyboard & mouse and used a PS2 keyboard & mouse, pressed F2 selected safe mode pressed enter, the writing scrolled up the screen and it then rebooted into windows, I tried it again and exactly the same happened, so no access to safe mode.So next I entered the BIOS and changed the first boot to CD, inserted my XP cd after writing down the key on the side of the machine, it booted of the CD and I started to follow the Powerless guide to an XP repair, upon pressing enter to install XP it said it could not find the drive with XP on it, so I took the side of the machine to find it had a SATA drive installed, so I asked them for the floppy with the SATA drivers on it, to be met with a blank stare.So they will have to take it to a place i recommended to sort it out as the place they brought it from 10 months ago has gone bust.Is there anything else I could have done that I have missed.I should add there was no back up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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