settings won't save

I have windows xp. There was a message that my files might have been corrupted with a trojan virus. I turned off the computer and in the morning tried to investigate it. It will log onto the screen where my name and my 3 family members names are. When I hit any of the names, it says it is loading settings but the icons don't load and in a few seconds it says "logging off ". I tried logging in in safe mode, and it does the same thing. I tried booting with my windows xp cd, and it won't load up. Any suggestions?

 

I don't know of any virus that would prevent the Windows setup CD from loading but that doesn't mean there isn't one. If you're sure you have the proper BIOS CMOS settings to allow polling the CD-ROM drive first in the boot sequence, I'd suggest that your setup CD may be flawed or your drive is not working.

For a test, boot to some other bootable CD if you have such, something like a hard drive manufacturers diagnostics CD. That would rule out a failed drive and perhaps point to some area of concern when you run a quick drive test.

If it's truly a virus, I'd think it'd have to be something like a boot sector gremlin. Those can normally be flushed out by running a fixboot command from a Recovery Console session.

If you have no bootable CD for testing, consider downloading and creating the set of floppies from MS. They will allow you to boot to the Recovery Console without relying on a CD.

There are other things but let's see what gives up to this point. One thing for sure, if you can't boot to Windows in any mode, and your CD drive and floppy drive won't work, you're pretty well snockered.

Post back your progress or comments and we'll see where it leads.

 

BTW, There are some great malware troubleshooters here so if you could post the system details of the problem system, it will no doubt help speed things along when they pick up on this.