wife busted PC with virus'

village_life

the wife was doing her usual trick of downloading dodgy games and promptly developed a colony of virus' on our PC

having done all the usual AV stuff it was still running rubbish so I decided to reformat.

However during the reformat process, it broke down and rebooted the machine, giving an "error, operating system invalid" message. I retried the format and it keeps breaking down at the same point.

When I identify the disk I want to format it is currently saying "unformatted or damaged" with no obvious way to correct the problem

recently shes been having problems with her SIMS2 game crashing every 10-15 minutes, so perhaps the two are related and its time for a new hard drive?

DrSmutt

possible that the HDD is faulty.

have you tried removing the partition and then installing windows.

kingmonkey

I dont understand what you are doing.

Are you reformatting another partition from within windows?

wolfman

I voted yes, just to cause a stir

imho

Bit late now but next time this happens try running a Virus scan in safe mode with system restore off.
Couldnt you just have done a "windows repair" ?

Moneymaker

I bought my wife a used Apple Mac. Problem solved!

buglawton

If you are really formatting the hard disk as you say (with a view to re-installing Windows from scratch), then you should boot from the recovery or installation CD-ROM and attempt the formatting from there. Not sure if that is what you are already trying. Don't forget to do a Windows Update as soon as you connect to broadband again, as the Windows on the install disk will be very out of date/insecure.

village_life

i did do the format from the boot CD-ROM and thats where it failed

anyway i found a convoluted way around it, basically stumbling across a Win98 Boot floppy i loaded that, formatted my drive, then converted the file system from FAT to NTFS, then installed Windows - and now we're back working again.

Anne_Marie_2

Whoa you lot, never had a virus on any of my pc's in my life.....until found stuff on my laptop, which I hadn't been using, but hubby had without my knowledge! Was mad, especially as he has his own flipping laptop, could easily have got that full of all that garbage. He was caught out very well, and now knows that I can see if he has been into porno sites and places he shouldn't be, and if he goes near any of my stuff again, he is dead! :rotfl:

lee634

Anne_Marie wrote:

Whoa you lot, never had a virus on any of my pc's in my life.....until found stuff on my laptop, which I hadn't been using, but hubby had without my knowledge! Was mad, especially as he has his own flipping laptop, could easily have got that full of all that garbage. He was caught out very well, and now knows that I can see if he has been into porno sites and places he shouldn't be, and if he goes near any of my stuff again, he is dead! :rotfl:

its nice to see a female computer geek thats better than her husband lol:rotfl:

Anne_Marie_2

lee634 wrote:

its nice to see a female computer geek thats better than her husband lol:rotfl:

Hopefully taking this as the way it's meant - yes some men can see computers being "their" thing. He hasn't got a clue, has no interest, just wants computer working. Suits us both fine, I do the computer stuff, he deals with house fixing stuff (lighting, plumbing, woodwork etc.)
I am not better than him....just better with computers!