I need help with an interesting problem...

Hello, this is my first post here, so hopefully it's not going to make me look like an idiot. I've been asked by a neighboor of mine if I could fix his computer, which normally isn't a big deal. I'm the only one around who really knows much about them, which isn't much to tell you the truth. Everything I know is self-taught, so bear with me if this is an obvious problem.

The computer is (groan) a Pentium 2 at about 500mhz, with Windows 98SE. They pay well though, so I'm willing to work with it. Anyway, when I boot up the computer normally, it stays at the black screen right before windows begins loading. I can boot it up in safe mode, but unfortunately internet and CD-Rom capabilities are disabled. I thought a win98 bootdisc would be a solution to this, but unfortuanately it's not. It'll only boot with CD capabilities in DOS, which I'm quite illiterate at (why bother? it's obsolete anyway...).

This means that there is no way for me to load any anti-virus software, HiJack, or any other tools that might help with the problem. I can't manually fix the problem if I don't know what it is to begin with, so any registry cleaning or manual deleting is out of the question.

I tried to connect his hard drive to my compter (Anthlon 64 Win XP), but ran into some very interesting and baffeling problems. Even when my hard drive is primary and his is secondary, my computer freezes much in the same way his did. This occurs in safe mode as well... Fortunately my computer works fine when his hard drive is not in, and no viruses were detected on mine, but I'm not sure what else I could do to scan that hard drive.

I should be able to get Stinger onto a floppy disc and scan that way, but I don't have a floppy drive in either of my current computers, so I'd have to dust off my older ones, plug in all of the removed components, and transfer Stinger over to the floppy. Considering this would be a rather intensive process, I thought I'd ask people who actually do know what they're doing for help.

Well, if you read the whole thing I thank you, and if you can offer advice, I thank you again. Please help me out.

Thanks, Jason

 

Oh I forgot to mention: The reason I put it on this forum is he scanned his computer with an old Norton 2002 (unupdated) and it detected a Backdoor Trojan. Since there's about 300 variants of this, it didn't really solve anything, but there you go. It doesn't actually sound like a Trojan to me, but it's the only thing I have to go off of. To think I'm wasting all this time on a crummy old computer...