I downloaded a program from someone on line....did not scan it for virus - i thought nortons anti virus was doing that automatically. i opened it and installed it.. it said reboot. i rebooted but my ME system would not reboot. i got a blue screen and an error message that said something like "during intialization IOS error detected. windows preotection error. restart computer. startup halted. " i think its fairly obvious i got a virus, and a serious one at that. but my norton antivirus rescue disks are not initiating any anti virus scanning...so i dont know how to use the emergency disks properly. i did get a startup disk from bootdisk.com, but cant get my cd-r to work..was hoping i could save files by copying them to the cds in the cd-r. thats not working. all i can do is get dos now.... btw, only have the OEM disks from sony...which include a system restore, and an applications restore. any help? please...important data..of course. deep doo-doo. hope the data can be saved, and the virus eliminated.

you can get to dos so you should be able to run a dos scanner .. like f-prot dos from http://www.f-prot.com/downloads/