Help! Trying to reformat
 

I don't know how, but I caught a crazy virus recently. It's turning on some sort of online radio without actually opening anything. It redirects all google results, it opens FF with multiple tabs to advertisement sites and, most recently, it opens up a pop-up of a girl screaming lol. I tried everything to fix it but now I'd just rather install a fresh OS. Then I ran into this after booting from my XP cd.



Then at the bottom, it said something like this:
Any ideas?

Does anything happen between the "press any key to boot from CD" and getting that error?

The XP install disc I'm using is pirated. I've used it before without any problems so I doubt the disc is the problem. There's 6 versions of XP the disc offers. When I install XP Pro, it doesn't even bring me to the part where it says something about RAID? or pressing F6? I can't remember. But when I chose XP Home, that part showed but gave me the error afterwards also. I downloaded the free version of avast! and rebooted after it finished install. It scanned and found a file (net.net) that is infected or something before Windows Vista started. I chose "delete" option and here I am. Still not virus-free :(

That error message during the text portion of install is a common sign of bad RAM.

If you have more than one stick, try removing all but one when installing. Or download and run MEMTEST86+ (www.memtest.org)

I had a similar problem last week. I had to reformat 3 times in one day. What i did is go into safe mode and used Spyware Doctor to remove the malware and spyware that I had in my hard drive. After doing that I reformated again. Now everything is running fine.

I'll try your way ml69. F8 to safe mode right? Should I run other anti-spyware/anti-virus programs? Lol, the avast! I installed won't even run >.<

Yeah F8 to get into safemode. I've been using Shaw secure. It detects everything.

a virus isn't going to stop you from booting off the XP cd to reformat....

if you are getting error msgs booting off the CD it's either hardware or bad CD.

So what should I do? How do I check which hardware is defective?


**Couldn't even run Spyware Doctor in safe mode. I did run SUPERAntiSpyware. Found 2 trojans and removed. Still the same error =\

It's a hardware problem in my opinion as well. The easiest way to find out which piece of hardware it is, is by removing or swapping.

I get this most often when I overclock too far.

I would start by getting a real cd..

Follow this advice. You probably have bad ram, find out if you do first and go from there.

what in the fuck are you doing? you keep toggling between removing a virus and reformatting, which is it that you want to do?

regardless listen to Soundy and check your RAM

Always good advice! :thumbsup: