BSOD immediately after boot

I have finally met the virus that has bested me. Let me first apologize, I am unable to perform any of the initial cleaning steps in the sticky post, as I am completely and utterly locked out of my laptop. Upon booting to windows, I get an immediate BSOD, that as best I can tell only says "Fatal error" with a code attached. It doesn't stay up long enough for me to read completely (is there a way to get it to stick around longer?). I've tried every Safe Mode option, all get the BSOD and won't boot.

The computer in question has CCleaner, AVG free, Spybot, and Ad-Aware all installed, regularly used and updated. I have the immunizations applied in Spybot. The problem first appeared when I was internet browsing (browsing only, no downloading). I got a redirect to one of the fake scan things, as happens from time to time. A quick spybot scan usually knocks them out. I did that and all seemed well, until a while later AVG popped up a warning. I'm afraid I can't remember the exact name now, but it said it was a "whitelisted" item and it had system32 in the name if I remember correctly. I went into defensive mode and immediately started a full host of scans, starting with spybot. It found a few malware entries, and cleaned all but one, which it said it needed to scan after a reboot to clean. I rebooted, but spybot hung and I had to kill the process. I thought nothing of it at the time, because my antiquated Lenovo does things like that all the time. Once into Windows, AVG started going completely nuts. It continually popped up the same whitelisted detection every few seconds. I ran CCleaner, then simultaneous scans with Spybot, Ad-Aware and AVG. Spybot found about the same results as before, again needing a reboot. Ad-aware came up with a couple of registry entries, and AVG 2 entries related to the popups it had been showering me with. AVG also said it need to reboot to clean, so I did so at this time. Thus began the BSOD errors and the complete lockout of my computer.

What I CAN do is enter BIOS and the Lenovo recovery programs, which are of no help to me unless I am ready to part with my 3 years of University work which is only paritally redunant on my other PC. Apparantly the Lenovo program cannot use the Windows system restore points.

A similar occurance happened to this same PC around 5 months ago, with slightly different symptoms. I don't think the AVG detections were exactly the same, but AVG has been through countless updates between the two events. The first started out the same way with the BSOD, but eventually got to the point where it would boot to the welcome screen, but show the "applying your settings" then cycle back to the welcome screen when clicking on an account. Booting under any safe mode would cause the BSOD. The help desk at my University was able to sort it out with one of their bootable recovery thingys; I believe what was the ultimate problem was a missing windows configuration file (Users.ini?) that caused the cyclic booting. Once that was replaced and I was into Windows, normal scans were able to kill off the rest of the virus (until now it seems). Unfortunately, I'm off for the summer and the walk-in help desk is not available to me now. Thus, in my desperate searches on the internet, I come across this mighty fine looking support forum, and hope that one of your amazing members might render some assistance.

Ah just thought of something else. I have an XP pro install CD and tried (the first time) to do a repair installation, as I was pretty sure the problem was imbedded in the OS files. The only problem being, it wanted SATA drivers, which I don't have, nor a floppy drive with which to load them. So unless there is a way around this little snafu that I am unaware of as of yet, it seems that avenue is blocked.

I apologize if I missed any of the policies before I posted (other than the inital cleaning steps) and did something wrong here. Please let me know and I will make sure it is corrected in the future.

 

Ok I've managed to boot with a disk created following the istructions here.

But when I booted from that disk, I couldn't figure out how to access my hard drive or run any scans. Any ideas as far as that goes?

Or, do any of you guys know how I can get around the SATA drivers problem to do a repair installation with my XP cd?

 

25 bucks? yeesh.

is it possible to make a bootable flash drive and putting scanning progs on it?

 

You should create a UBCD4Win (Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows). You can download it from this link, and the how-to-build-the-CD guide can be found at this link. It is more-or-less the same as the boot CD you already made, but way better. It includes several antivirus programs, file explorers, drive utilities, etc. It is much easier than trying to build your own custom PECD. A list of programs that are already included with the download can be found here. Once it's built and you boot to it, it is REALLY easy to run scans, browse your drive(s), back up data, you name it. If you're really motivated, you can add your own programs or update the programs that come with it... whatever.

 

excellent, i'll give that a look. thanks.

honestly, it's about time to toss this brick against the wall and redeem my accidental coverage, but i'd like to have my 3 years of Uni work back first

 

Please try something quite simple which has been known to work before.

Do the following: (Yes, I know you said you did try "all the Safe Mode options", but did you try this?)

Start tapping F8 after the BIOS beep, as if you were going to boot into Safe Mode. Now,when the Windows Advance Options Menu appears, instead of heading straight for Safe Mode, simply select the option to "Disable automatic restart on system failure". This will only apply once on the following boot and then reset to the "automatic restart" again. ("Automatic restart" should be disabled later, when you can get your operating system up and running.)

Now try restarting your system normally. If it doesn't work first time, try it again (you will have to go through the same process again). At least you will get your wish to have a close look at that BSOD, if Windows doesn't boot up!

Good luck, and please let us know what happens when you try the restart normally. It may be that the "Logon/Logoff Loop" will apply, in which case, you would do well to have a look at this thread. http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=191140&highlight=AustrAlien

 

I finally got some time to spend on this, and have pulled the hard drive out of the laptop and put it into the desktop. However, scans came up empty for the most part. AVG found one virus (trojan downloader), not the same one that was invading prior to the BSODs. It also came up with "information" items, 4 "runtime packed mew" items. I'm don't know what that means, but those same 4 have appeared in every AVG scan for a long time, and I recognize the files as IBM driver/utility files. Stuff like the shock detection. I'm pretty sure the nasties are buried in the registry, but I don't know how to scan that with the drive in as a secondary. I still have a couple scans to go though.

Also, is it safe to copy the userinit.exe from my desktop's system32 file over to the laptop's? I'm almost certain that if I can ever get the damn thing to boot, it's going to get the login/logout loop, because that is what happened last time. The the desktop (healty) file is 25.5 kb and has a creation date in 2003. The laptop's file is 24.0 kb and has a creation date in 2004

 

Yes, I ran all of those. But I felt it was also rather important to run a virus scan. Most of the scans came up empty, superantispyware found 1 that looked like a similiar name to the one picked up by AVG.

 

I'm a more advanced PC user than average, and can usually sort this stuff out. I'd like to give it a go myself so I don't waste anyone's time and make a longer wait for someone who needs it more.

 

Yes. I've had to do this before in cases where malware hijacked the userinit file. I renamed the infected one to something like userinit.exe.infected before copying the clean one over, just in case I needed to revive it for some reason (I've never had to).

 

yeah, backups are always wise. i've run every scan possible from this computer, so i guess it's time to throw it back in the laptop and give it another go at booting.

 

Still can't get it to boot in the laptop, i think i've hit the point where doing a repair installation is necessary. I THOUGHT that a Win XP disk with SP2 was supposed to contain SATA drivers and not have to do the third party floppy thing, but both my SP2 disk and a slipstreamed SP3 disk (from the SP2 original) gave me the same "no hard disks were detected". anyone know a way to get the drivers loaded up? i don't have a floppy drive, but i assume i can get the actuall drivers from Lenovo's website.