Hello! Thanks for reading my post . So here's my story.... My friend has a laptop that has recently caught something pretty nasty, so being a good friend I offered to fix it for him. This is where the fun begins... I was just going to format and reinstall windows, but to no avail, the cd-rom is dying. So I took my seagate USB HDD and made a bootable XP install off of it.. To no avail again, when I get to the partitions section of the windows install, the USB HDD was registered as C: and the HDD from the laptop is not present. So I figured since I can't re-install windows I can atleast have it running for him.. Atleast I thought. I figured my first step should be to perform a system restore to a date well enough before the infection. Yet again, failure... When I run system restore I get a message stating "System Restore has been turned off by group policy, to turn on blah blah" which led me here. I deleted the values.. But one value comes back, and I still can't run system restore. So I decided to skip my "step 1" and went to the anti-malware programs. They won't load.... HJT Adaware SB S&D. Internet Explorer won't load on it either! For the programs I re-installed and copied and renamed the exe's etc.. Still no luck!! Any help would be appreciated! thanks again!

Hello parmaisboring.

Welcome to PCHF.

May I ask if you can break this paragraph down as to explain exactly what you have done here please.

*EDIT: due to mis-reading....

Thanks for the reply and thanks for the warm welcome

Here's the breakdown..


Created a bootable XP install off of my USB HDD but the laptops HDD wasnt present during the part where it asks you create and delete partitions from the selected drive... I followed a guide that I found on the net.

Ok so let me get this right.

Your trying to do some kind of recovery/install to the laptop via your USB HDD yes?

That would be lovely if possible.. I've found many guides on installing windows from a USB device, but none have worked for me. Any suggestions on getting a working windows installation from the USB device or advice on cleaning out the infection on the laptop would be wonderful also. I'm sorry i'm a little out there today, i'm hung over and not thinking too great

Ok

Disconnect this USB HDD for the present time and reboot.

Never mind about the malware that might be present at the moment, does it reboot into windows ok?

Yeah the laptop's in windows..