BSOD in perpetuity

jimpeel · Oct 19, 2010

My daughter's computer -- Thinkpad T Series from Lenovo -- refuses to boot. I have tried everything on the advanced options screen to no avail.

It starts to boot and then displays the BSOD and reboots itself.

I do not know if this is a disease or if it is a hardware/software problem.

The closest I have been able to get to a normal boot is use "disable automatic reboot on system failure" but it still gives me the BSOD.

I need to boot the machine into Malwarebytes, or some such, but do not know how to do that or to get it to stay on long enough for me to take an action.

Any help on how to do this?

Thanks,

J

jimpeel · Oct 19, 2010

Update:

I tried Knoppix Linux and it booted without a problem. The problem is that I do not know enough about Linux to use it effectively. I need to get to the C: drive to run the anti spyware/virus programs.

jimpeel · Oct 20, 2010

I downloaded and burned the AVG Rescue CD and then ran it on my daughter's computer. It says that nearly every .htm, .html, and .dll file on the entire computer is infected with a virus. There are some, but not many, .exe files coming up as infected.

Can this really be true? I am talking about possibly 2,000 files being infected. Is there anything out there that is that infectious as to infect that many files? If so, this unit is toast. She has no recovery disks for this unit that I know of.

TimW · Oct 20, 2010

Ramnit virus will do that. This infection has really become quit nasty and dangerous. We could attempt to remove and have had some success in the past, but recently it has become even more trouble to remove. It is really safer to just bite the bullet and do a clean reinstall.

The problem is that the damage caused by this infection really makes a PC unreliable/untrustworthy. PE file infectors like Ramnit, Virut,.... etc are can infect all executable files (DLL, EXE, SCR....and many more and also HTML). These infections can open back doors that truly may compromise your computer and your security. These backdoors, could allow a remote attacker to access and instruct the infected computer to download and execute more malicious files.

In many cases the infected files (which could number in the thousands) cannot be disinfected properly by your anti-virus or by other scanning tools. Also when disinfection is attempted, the files often become corrupted and the system may become unstable or irrepairable. The longer Ramnit.A remains on a computer, the more files it infects and corrupts so the degree of infection can vary.

Ramnit is commonly spread via a flash drive (usb, pen, thumb, jump) infection where it copies Worm:Win32/Ramnit.A with a random file name. The infection is often contracted by visiting remote, crack and keygen sites. These type of sites are a major source of system infection.

So all the above being said, and please do take serious note of the warnings, do you really wish to attempt cleaning even though the stability and security of your be cannot be guaranteed? And also, we could spend a lot of time trying to fix it and still fail due to the number of files that have been infected.

jimpeel · Oct 20, 2010

The final number of infected files was 6,603. The drive is toast. There is no way that I would attempt a recovery as the damage is so extensive that it would require an inordinate amount of time to list all of the .dll files and reinstall them. On top of that, there would be no way, as you have stated, to ensure that the new files would not become corrupted upon installation.

Thanks for the reply and the heads up.

j

TimW · Oct 21, 2010

Yes, I am afraid that you will need to do a complete reformat and re-install.

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BSOD in perpetuity

jimpeel Sergeant

jimpeel Sergeant

jimpeel Sergeant

TimW MajorGeeks Administrator - Jedi Malware Expert Staff Member

jimpeel Sergeant

TimW MajorGeeks Administrator - Jedi Malware Expert Staff Member