Hello.. thanks for checking out this post. A few days ago I was working on my laptop and wiping my recycle bin when AVG Free 8.x tells me there's some sort of malware found in the recycle bin. I ignore it thinking it was just your usual harmless tracking cookie.. then insert BSOD and restart. ScanDisk runs before the OS loads and it takes much more longer than usual.. it tries to recover a lot of 'orphaned files' and I let it run for a bit while I do other things. When I come back I see my laptop rebooting over and over again .. always rebooting shortly after the windows XP logo and before the logon screen comes on. I can't get into Safe Mode or the Last Good Config. .. the same thing happens. I wanted to copy my files over to another hard drive.. but I've been reading up on the boot sector virus and it seems to be able to do just what I've described. I'm not certain it is.. I didn't want to try the fixboot and fixmbr because I wanted to backup my files.. but again... don't want to spread around the virus.. so I'm kind of stuck. I tried doing another scan disk and a hard drive diagnostics from a given option in the BIOS.. and the HD seem to be okay. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I had a similar problem using AVG freeware. It's a piece of crap. It missed some sort of boot virus which ruined my system. I had to wipe the HDD and start from scratch (luckily it wasn't my business PC). I stupidly installed AVG again and it happened again some months later. This time I paid for McAffee security suite and have had no problem since. Beware, sadly you get what you pay for! Superyutz' Renderings Nottingham, MD. 21236 Words and Graphics for the Common Man

I just did a restore from the recovery partition on my hard drive. Now my problem has changed ... how do you access the ntfs files after re-installing? I know the password from before.. but how would I enter it to decrypt the files? I can't view the files... but I saw my AV scan the files in that folder.