Hi guys.
Could use a few suggestions before I decide to attempt a recovery of my Sony Vaio VGC-LA1 (all in one) XP media centre edition 2005.
I was infected by the "windows security alert" virus/trojan a few days ago, which locked down firefox (Chrome and IE would also not start) and wouldn't let me shut down. I used another PC to read up before being forced into using the alert and read that it forces you to run a scan of your PC, where it then tries to get you to buy/register a scanning program. I thought this may cause an infection, so I turned the power off by holding down the power on button (I guess this was a silly idea?) and as a result, I had to then unplug one of my external hard drives ( I have 2 seagate ones) for a successful boot up. After half an hour booted up, all would run fine until a win32 message would come up, which deactivated browsing/inet connection, but all else seemed to work. AVG was recognising a win32/heur virus, but I wasn't able to heal - had to move to the virus vault. Firefox home page had also been changed to Searchqu and the Ask toolbar appeared.
I ran Malwarebytes and then Spybot S&D, but neither did detected anything, so I phoned my techie friend and ended using the free trial of Hitman Pro 3.5. Hitman Pro cleaned several things - mostly tracking cookies, but a couple of Trojans. One named sector 0 (I think), which required a reboot to remove. I did this and performance improved, but the Win32/inet connection fault came again. I ran Hitman pro again and it found another trojan (but no cookies etc). On the next reboot, I ran it again and this time nothing was identified.
Seeing as AVG seemed to do little in preventing this I closed it (AVG 8.5) and then installed the free version of Avast to do a check. It completed an autocheck of my PC with nothing found, but I decided to run the full check in safe mode. I turned off my PC, went out for the day and the next day, when turning on and pressing F8 on the Vaio logo to access the safe mode option/menu screen, nothing happened. The blinking cursor then arrived (the page just before XP loads) and stayed and I have to keep holding down the power to re-try a reboot. I even left it half an hour blinking, but nothing. It isn't possible to type anything either.
I can enter Bios via F2, but F10/F12 do not bring up anything. Bios recognises the system ram, HD and model (VGC LA1), but resetting to default did nothing. I even went to the bother of taking the PC apart and unplugging the internal HD, turning it on to receive the "operating system not recognised" message, plugging the HD back in and booting again (I'd read this worked on several sites).
I then ran the recovery CD and diagnostics, which showed nothing wrong with any of the hardware. So I take it my next and final step is to run a full recovery? Luckily I had backed up my pictures and music, but not my documents. Not a major issue to lose that, but if it were avoidable etc...
SHould I have let the microsoft alert virus run the scan and then run my anti-malware software? Hindsight! Wish I'd known how to enter safe mode without shutting down.... Any other suggestions before I try a C: recovery? Just strange that I removed the trojan and the last thing I did, installing Avast caused XP not to load.
Thanks
