Sunday, July 12, 2015

Recovering badly infected windows system


Suddenly something bad happened. My computer downloaded some deadly virus, that did not let me open any windows having anti-virus software. I tried restoring the system, and the option seemed to be switched off. Basically the virus has taken over my system completely like a real virus. I tried using some tricks like choosing setup options on boot time and changing the windows to a previous normal boot option. This failed. I tried booting the computer in safe mode, and that also failed. Now I can't even boot it. I get a blue screen that says windows has shutdown for preventing any further damage.

Now the only option seem to be available for me is to do a system recovery and in that process to be prepared to loose all data and softwares installed by me. While that is an option still available, there are several great discussions on web that tells how not to loose data while doing a system recovery. Here it is:

While I am seriously considering what is said in this web site, I am intrigued about what a windows XP setup CD is like. I don't find one that could have come with my computer. Now looking up at the web (here: http://old.bink.nu/xpbootcd/, I found this great article. While this article describes in detail about how to creat a bootable CD, I will describe here my experience:

1. Downloaded bootsector for XP.
2. Extract your XP ISO file with winimage (or ISO Buster) to D:\winxpcd
For this I got the iso file from the microsoft site:
here it is: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2fcde6ce-b5fb-4488-8c50-fe22559d164e&displaylang=en

I download Iso Buster from the following web site. Since winimage is not free and the available version also is not compatible with windows 7, I passed it.
http://www.isobuster.com/isobusterdownload.php

Burn CD

However, to burn CD, you have to follow the following instructions if you are using windows 7 with latest Roxio software.

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