What are my Win 7 repair options?

I am working on a friend's Vaio laptop with Windows 7. He had malware such that every time it connected to a network, it would shutdown Windows and reboot. A full Malwarebytes scan turned up nothing, ditto for Norton AV which he had installed.

I pulled his HDD and put it in another computer which happened to have Kaspersky Business AV installed. As soon as I booted up, Kaspersky found "Rootkit.Boot.Pihar.b" on the object "\DEVICE\HARDDISK1\DR1" and it "disinfected" it without asking.

Upon returning the HDD to the Vaio, surprise, it won't boot! It has the option to do a Startup Repair, which recommended a System Restore, but this didn't work. Also can't access Safe Mode, and Last Known Good doesn't work.

I don't see a Windows 7 CD anywhere with his stuff. I do see a 100MB partition on the drive which appears to have Windows file, possibly to do a factory restore.

Short of copy off his data and doing a factory restore, are there any other options to repair this OS? It may be only one file that got "repaired" by Kaspersky.

I am a corporate IT person, but I hardly ever have to deal with issues like this because I don't typically have infections in our company. Win 7 is obviously a lot different than repairing XP used to be.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

The 100MB partition is NOT a recovery partition. It's a small partition used by Windows 7. If you don't see a partition with several GB separate from the Windows installation partition, then there probably isn't a recovery partition on the drive.

It's never a good idea to remove a boot drive and connect it as an external drive to another computer if you plan on booting from it again.

You will likely need to format the drive and reinstall Windows (in the computer it belongs to). The Windows 7 installation will provide the option to format the drive. Again, if there's no recovery partition, then probably his only option is to obtain the recovery media from Sony for that particular model.

 

Thank you for clarifying that about the 100MB partition. My friend thinks he may have a Windows DVD that came with his system.

In the absence of that, I downloaded the Windows 7 Home Premium ISO from MS, which is the OS on this laptop. I'm not sure if I can use it to try any repairs, but if anyone knows, your help is appreciated. I'm just trying to avoid the wipe/reinstall if possible.

 

Does your friend have a restore CD ??

 

I'd head over to http://forums.majorgeeks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=35 which will help out with this type of situation. What they do there is help get rid of malware infected computers. They will make your computer rise up and give a sigh a relief.

 

He's supposed to be digging it out for me tonight. I didn't exactly love XP, but at least I could repair stuff like this.

 

Yea, I know buddy, I'm on XP right now, and it is kind of easy to repair.We're here for you my friend.

 

Well, my friend found a set of three recovery DVDs he made when he bought the computer. I backed up all his data, just did the factory restore. He lost some apps, but he'll be able to piece things back together.

Thanks all for the help and advice!