A mate of mine has brought me a PC begging me to fix it after, and I quote "My girlfriend did some stuff at this screen and now it won't boot it just hangs at this screen and I can't get into windows or nothin'" Of course I thought "lawlz, she probably just broke the MBR, or mis-tweaked the BIOS" or he was over-reacting and with a DOS-boot-disk I could get into windows easy-town.

Turning out this is not so easy, like the title states it hangs at "Starting MS-DOS" the BIOS picks up a Boot-Sector virus and you can boot to a floppy or continue loading which is where the hang occurs. Since using my bootdisk I can make it into his C:/ partition and cruise around and execute programs I'm guessing it's the Boot-Sector Virus that's just preventing booting, which is why I can bypass it relatively easy. My question is...how do you remove a boost-sector virus? He wants to keep his files, mainly his music, so I had two ideas, either stick in another drive and boot to that and then copy the stuff to the new drive, format the old, copy back, take out my drive, I don't really want to put his drive in my PC due to the virus...and I can't seem to find any of my troubleshooting boxes...which would explain the lumps of molten metal on the burn pile and why my fiance has had this guilty look on her face and bought me like 10 new games.

When the virus is picked up it says to boot from a clean disk that has "SYSTEM" on it...does it mean "system.ini"? I'm not too sure what it wants from there. The win98 boot disk has system on it...so...

My question to you guys is...what can I do? Can I format the MBR without losing the ability to boot? Should I try scanning the thing for virii? Should I try my suggestions?

His system runs on win98se
He has a AMDK6 333Mhz
2 HDDs, one's 10 GB, the other is...plugged in, but not showing up.

To Update:
He now claims his GF deleted a bunch of files, of course I haven't the foggiest as to what they are, but what would stop Win98 from booting? I'm thinking the best solution would be to just take his files and copy them somewhere else and reformat...because...I don't really think it's worth the amount of effort it would take to track down what files were missing and replace them correctly...though it would be a neat learning experience, I wouldn't know where to start, lol.

You might try to boot from your Windows 98 CD by setting your BIOS to boot from CD and try to reinstall the operating system without format.

If you think it could be a virus, most anti-virus programs let you make a set of rescue disk that will remove such viruses.