stressed with system tools

[z-dan]

Hi guys, just joined for advice as I have no idea where to turn.

A couple of days ago I got the System Tools virus, no idea where from though I've heard some people got it from Facebook. Had the usual symptoms: fake virus scan, labels every process as infected including ctrl-alt-del, etc. I panicked and restarted the computer by forced shutdown in the hopes it wouldn't save, and as it was restarting- it wouldn't boot. Gets through the dell loading screen but not as far as the windows loading screen. I've got 2 hard drives on my puter, and have managed to convince it to let me boot through the second hard drive which literally just has windows on it- no sound drivers or internet access or anything (I'm posting through my clean laptop) but I can access my infected hard drive through the second to access files. I've deleted the desktop shortcut, the file the shortcut directed to in appdata, and I heard there's meant to be a similar file in programdata and can find the folder but not the file. I made sure hidden files were visible, and I tried downloading malwarebytes on this laptop, transferring to the clean hard drive, then running but it won't let me (error 372 I think?). I'm convinced I can fix the virus if I could access my infected hard drive but it won't let me log on, even with F8 safe mode. Let me know if there's any info I can give that might help, or better yet a suggestion on how to get to safe mode without F8... I know reinstalling windows is a possibility, but I'm not sure where my boot disc is and don't want to risk losing files I might have forgotten to transfer to the other hard drive.

I'm on a 3 year old Dell computer running XP.

Thanks in advance,

Dan

[MrCharlie]

Welcome to the forum.

This doesn't sound good but we can give it a shot.

You'll need a usb flash drive and be able to burn a cd.

The cd I would like you to create is OTLPE:

Download OTLPE from here or here

Now put a blank cd-r in your burner and double click on OTLPEStd.exe, it will automatically burn the cd. (burn it at a slow speed to avoid errors)

Once you have the cd, boot the computer up using it.

Note : If you do not know how to set your computer to boot from CD follow the steps here

It's going to go something like this when OTLPE loads:

• Your system should now display a REATOGO-X-PE desktop.
  
• Double-click on the OTLPE icon.
  
• When asked "Do you wish to load the remote registry", select Yes
  
• When asked "Do you wish to load remote user profile(s) for scanning", select Yes
  
• Ensure the box "Automatically Load All Remaining Users" is checked and press OK
  
• OTL should now start.
  
• Under the Custom Scan box paste this in:
  netsvcs
  drivers32
  %SYSTEMDRIVE%\*.*
  /md5start
  explorer.exe
  winlogon.exe
  wininit.exe
  userinit.exe
  /md5stop
  
• Press Run Scan to start the scan.
  
• When finished, the file will be saved in drive C:\OTL.txt
  
• Copy this file to your USB drive if you do not have internet connection on this system
  
• Please post the contents of the C:\OTL.txt file in your reply.
  

MrC

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