Two laptops always booting to start-up repair and unable to install windows

**Vítor Gaspar** · May 25, 2011, 12:22 PM

I'm going mad.

I have this friend who is a huge mess with computers. She's completely clueless about what's safe and what isn't safe, and I'm led to believe she might be visiting pornographic sites for getting her computer to a point like this

Anyway, straight to the subject (I'm about to go nuts with it): The laptop is an Asus K50-IJ and the OS is Windows 7 Home Premium edition, I suppose.

This laptop caught some crazy virus, apparently through a flash drive. From then on it stopped to boot correctly. It goes straight to Startup repair (which shows up in English - mind you the Windows is in Portuguese) and even after following the instructions and "repairing" the installation it just restarts and the same occurs again.

Since she had to prepare a school-work for the following day, she ended up borrowing her friend's laptop AND using her flash drive in it

the other computer died as well. It's doing exactly the same thing. It's also an Asus, although it's a different - yet very similar - model.

Well, since her computer had 3 partitions, and one of them was empty, I borrowed a Windows 7 DVD (you know, her computer didn't came with any DVD - it was stored inside the hard rive, and I'm unable to repair it from there) to make a clean install in the empty partition (after formatting it, just for being sure) but when it gets to 84% in the extraction phase of the install it stops and gives an error saying it's unable to "extract the files".

I wanted to do this since I want to gain access to C:/ and back up her pictures and school-works. She doesn't want to lose that and she doesn't have any backup. Although that isn't the problem, as I'll use Acronis for backing up anything which is needed, in case this doesn't work.

The problem now is with installing windows. Could a virus make you unable to install an OS in your hard drive?

It couldn't be a virus but some technical problem, but it's the 4th computer in a row (I know of another two), so I'm guessing it has to be a virus.

Seriously guys, I'm dieing for help here.

**PoleCat** · May 26, 2011, 12:58 AM

This is quite the problem. As no one else seems to have the balls to help I'll try it out....

Originally Posted by Duberdicus

...Anyway, straight to the subject

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

First off - stop using that flash drive. If it has affected two different computers already then you can bet it's infected. Don't plug it into any Windows system again. If you have access to a Linux system you may be able to clean it. But in reality it may not be worth the effort - flash memory is pretty cheap and you may not want to bother.

Originally Posted by Duberdicus

Well, since her computer had 3 partitions,

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

What made you decide to format and overwrite the "empty" third partition? Did you see something there that you found suspicious? You'd be better off making a flash drive bootable and trying from that angle. What does the error message say exactly?

Originally Posted by Duberdicus

I wanted to do this since I want to gain access to C:/ and back up her pictures and school-works.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

First off - slap her for not having a backup of her critical files. Then do it again for good measure.

Try running Malwarebytes in Safe Mode. No guarantees that it will solve the problem but at least it's a step in the direction you want to go. Let us know if this helps or hinders. Good luck!

**Musthavename** · May 26, 2011, 05:47 AM

Reformatting the entire drive via some bootable tool would should ofcourse solve the problem, but that ofcourse wipes any data you'd want to recover.

Now, normally i'd say to take the hard drive out and hook it up to another machine, but with a suspected virus that's not an option. What would be an option however is doing this inside Linux. If you have a Linux machine it should be immune to whatever is on there. Infact, it might be an option to download Linux of some sort and install it onto this "Third Partition" you have spare. Since this would put a new bootloader on (i.e. GRUB), you should be able to boot into Linux and be able to access your files from there.

Also, I presume you can access the BIOS. Will the machine boot in Safe Mode (press F8 during startup)?

**atraps** · May 26, 2011, 05:47 PM

Load Parted Magic and retrieve her data. Then wipe all partitions from the hard drive and install Windows. If it still fails either the hard drive or the Windows disk is faulty.

**PoleCat** · May 27, 2011, 01:29 AM

Originally Posted by atraps

Load Parted Magic and retrieve her data....

Nice. Thanks for that tool.

**Bolkonsky** · May 27, 2011, 11:57 AM

Just go with the safest way. Boot Linux (Ubuntu, I think they have a live version) and gather what data you need from her HDD. Then format and reinstall Windows. The only way that won't work is if it's a BIOS virus, but I don't know exactly how those work, and I'm not keen on finding out.

**Vítor Gaspar** · May 29, 2011, 05:03 PM

I ended up managing to make the windows DVD run. Apparently there was something wrong with the DVD, it's just weird that it worked in other computers but those. I had to use a backup copy, but well, I guess that isn't illegal since she had the original one. If not, who cares, right?

Anyway, I managed to save her files through acronis and I formatted the computer. So far everything's working fine, but this thread is full of great advices, so thank you guys

It looks it wasn't as bad as it seemed.