XP Laptop won't boot

Okay I've taken a good look at most other threads on this and other forums and nothing seems to work, so I'm going to try a direct approach. I picked up some malware and after some extensive Malware Bytes, Adaware and Spybot scans the malware seemed to be cleaned. The next restart faces me with a BSOD with the following error codes-

***STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF8898528, 0xc0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

It also says that I should check for viruses which is interesting considering it won't let me boot up :confused

I've tried using an external usb hard drive with xp installed but there's no luck booting from it but I'm not much of a pro so don't even know if XP can boot via a usb device. Inserting the XP disc gives no help, I can get to the recovery console and installation screens but then it says there's no hard drive installed even though it's detected in the BIOS.

Right ... any ideas?

 

Inaccessible Boot Device, can you add the drive to a 2nd computer to run Malware scans and run Chkdsk? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103 gives some good troubleshooting techniques.

 

Cool thanks for the reply. I've never opened a laptop before etc I'll see what I can rip out and have a look through my cables for connection purposes.

 

Awesome idea, I managed to get to the hd and connect it to another laptop, chkdsk runs and says there's no problems and I can see all my files are on the drive still which is a relief. I'm about to start running anti-malware stuff again.

 

Ok, that's good news so far ... and rules out the worst case scenario

 

I'm not sure what this means now but I was able to run the recovery consoles from the second laptop on the hd successfully but I get the same blue screen when I plug it back into the original laptop. :confused

 

You're sure you were accessing the correct Windows installation?

Which commands did you give from the Recovery Console? What were the results given?

 

Definitely the right installation there's no partitions or different OSs installed and it was the only hdd connected to the laptop at the time. I can run the recovery console but don't know enough about the commands to run anything other than chkdsk and even then I don't quite understand the results unless it blatantly lists an error.

There wasn't anything important on the drive so I reformatted it with a fresh xp install but still no joy in getting it the original laptop to boot. :-o