Hi,
I have a sony vaio laptop with 2.1 GHZ and 2 Gb RAM. I had installed windows XP but now its affected with viruses and it is rebooting everytime i logged in. My dvd drive is not working properly. I have very important datas in the hard drive.Is there any way to save my data as well as reinstall XP?? I can afford to lose the data present in the os partition but not the entire HDD.Could external cd drives be used to boot winXP cd?
You say your DVD drive isn't working properly..? Presumably it will work well enough to allow you to try the folloiwng path...? Get yourself a Knoppix or Ubuntu disk and boot up with that - having set cd.dvd unit to be first boot source.
Knoppix/Ubuntu are Linux variants and install entirely into RAM; and then HDD is meraly a resource to the OS. Thus you can access/copy data to optical media; and verify (check) the copies are truly accessible/readable etc.on at least one other system - before proceeding to recover a working system.
Knoppix.com; Ubuntu.com - both have freebie downloadable ISO images; which save to a HDD and then burn to a DVD. Boot with that DVD.
While booted as suggested... go on-line to Trend.com and run their freebie "housecall" utility. Allow it to run a full scan. Perhaps do that first - before copying data. Also clear out anything it may quarantine to the HDD.
After-which (and when all data copied to optical media) reboot to installed OS and see if any improvements? You might also run the "housecall" scan via that installed OS; but first disable System Restore - before you run the scan. Once scan completed, reboot; then re-enable System Restore and reboot again.
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