Another Boot.exe not found

hello

first: i did use search, but i got various threads, all of which didnt apply to my case.

i have a nice shiny External HDD, Western Digital 500Gb. its not new, ive already used it for 2 months.

while i was at a friend's house, copying some data, his realtimeprotector pops up and tells me boot.exe is infected. i dont know what it is, but we didnt delete it. when i connected it to my pc, i got the same message as well.

since i had to re install XP anyway, i backed everything up to my HDD, as i was able to access it with autostart (when you connect it when the pc's running) and explore options. the boot.exe got deleted. i hope my backed up data is not corrupted, it contains important info for me.

since i read various threads about the autorun.inf file, i searched the Ext. HDD for any file with autorun in it. it came up with various things, all which didnt had the 2 sentences with boot.exe which have to be deleted.

when i bought it there was an autorun.inf file with it, along with an icon. since i didnt want that icon i removed it, and removed the autorun.inf with it, because all there was in it was 2 sentences to have the icon show up in the MyComputer folder.

i read i have to use various programs like HijackThis to get rid of it, aswell as Register Editing but i am hesitant to use them on my shiny new XP install

it annoys me to pieces so to speak.

thank you for helping in advance.

regards

Meastro444
(ps, i'm Dutch, i may not be able to figure out a few words )

 

hello

my problem is solved, i think; i dont get the message anymore. i did read the guidelines, but ive already done what it told me to do.

what i did:
after enabling me to see every file, i found the autorun.inf i saw on the many threads about this, and deleted these lines

the boot.exe self is gone aswell, it got deleted by AVG.
the autorun.inf is still there, but only with these lines

is it possible there are remnants left of this error/malware?

regards

Meastro444