Hello,

My girlfriend's PC has a virus. Here are some symptoms -

When booting normally, screen turns black after the windows XP splash screen. Will not go any further.

Won't boot in safe mode.

Can't run virus scan while booting from the Norton 2007 CD.

I'd like to try to remove the instead of having to wipe the drive clean.

Here's my question - if I pull her hard drive out and put it as a secondary drive in my system, can I then scan her drive with my installed Norton and remove her viruses that way? Will the virus be detected? Is a low-level reformat inevitable?

Any feedback would help. thanks a bunch.

"Can't run virus scan while booting from the Norton 2007 CD."

Actually, that kind of convinces me you DON'T have a virus (or, at least, that is not the cause of these problems) - a boot CD is self contained, and loads its own OS - in order for "a virus" to do anything, it has to be running - which it would not be in that situation

Symptoms suggest a hardware problem

If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't, I'll just respond, cleverly

--Donald Rumsfeld

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thanks for the response - it actually does run the virus scan, but not the full scan, it only does a quick 5 second scan. That's all it will allow me to do. How do you feel about detecting the virus if it's attached as a secondary drive? thanks a bunch.

Ok - look, "the virus" at this point is only a theory of yours. There is No Way it would be stopping Norton from performing a scan when booting from a CD

How do I 'feel'? Hmmm...

By all means attach it to another system and scan away - I'm sure you'll find something (it's rare not to) but I rather doubt you'll resolve the issue that way - either you've bad hardware or else there is a Windows issue

I would suggest leaving the drive where it is and boot from your Windows CD in order to use its various repair features - maybe start with chkdsk

If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't, I'll just respond, cleverly

--Donald Rumsfeld

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great, i'll try booting from the windows CD. It's entirely possible I didn't run the virus scan correctly - so the idea that it was prevented from running could have been from me not running it right.

I'll start with the chkdsk, if nothing changes then i'll hook it to another system. Thanks for your help, and enjoy your weekend

Sure thing - there are a lot of threats out there these days, but from your description, I wouldn't suspect virus or malware just yet.

Booting from a CD is more or less the same concept as slaving the drive to another machine - you're bypassing the installed Operating System. Virus have to be running in order to achieve their goals, so on a compromised machine, they wouldn't normally be activated when booting from a different drive.

Chkdsk will determine if the drive has any errors or defects which might be preventing Windows from loading, and a reasonable place to start

If I know the answer I'll tell you the answer, and if I don't, I'll just respond, cleverly

--Donald Rumsfeld

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