can't boot, diagnostics detect virus

Hi,

My son and I built his computer in 2007. It has been running with nary a problem all this time but last week it stopped booting. The mb posts, the cursor blinks, then disappears and that's it. At first I thought it was a hw failure but I've done the following:

- tried to boot from recovery disk. Prompted to bood from cd then exact same problem. It's hard for me to understand how a virus in the mbr gets involved when I boot from the recovery disk. It seems more likely there's a virus in non-volatile memory (cmos?) but I'm not an expert.
- booted ubcd and I've run the following diagnostics:
- disk scan - passed
- memory scan - passed
- cpu test - passed

However, tonight when I launched a couple of the freeware partition managers on ubcd, they claim there's a virus in the mbr.

Since the machine can't boot, I'm not able to run any of the procedures in the faq. Any help would be appreciated.

tia,
jd

Here are the main components of the build:
ASUS M2A-VM HDMI AM2 AMD 690G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+ Brisbane 2.1GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor
G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel
LG 18X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black IDE Model GSA-H42LK
maxtor hd
running 64 bit xp sp3
av - ca

 

thanks, which should I try first? Is one more effective than another?

 

Hi vinouspleasure,

I've had some success with Kaspersky Rescue Disk in the past. Haven't tried the others to be honest.

There is a step by step tutorial for using Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 here.

Hope this helps