at the end of my chain

[winslow33]

I'm trying to fix a computer for a family friend. It's so infected with viruses when I started it took 53 minutes exactly to boot. Apparently he was running it with no antivirus for several years on the internet.

I've ran NOD 32, Norton, AVG Free, Sygate, and MalwareBytes Antimalware and a few others, counting up a total of sever hundered seperate bugs and trojans and spyware. Now it's a little faster at least but it still takes about half an hour to load. All my antivirus scans now are coming up clean, but I know there's still something wrong with it to be this slow. Granted, when I got it Windows XP Home was limping along with 128MB of RAM, I've put in some of my spare sticks and got 325MB I guess it wont exactly be fast or anything but its still excuciatingly slow, compared to my machine with 256MB running XP that can outrun it...]

I want to do a reformat and put XP back on, should be nice and fast again. The thing is that our friend doesnt want me to do this for some reason.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

[hairyspin]

I'm trying to fix a computer for a family friend.....Apparently he was running it with no antivirus for several years on the internet.....I want to do a reformat and put XP back on....The thing is that our friend doesnt want me to do this for some reason.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

Walk away.

[hey_moe]

Belive it or not once a virus get on a HD it stays there until you do a complete disk wipe. If it is that infected ya might as well wipe it.

[hairyspin]

Like the man says. Several years of anything from the net running amok on an XP OS? Rootkits, spyware, trojans etc?

It ain't repairable.

Your friend has two options - start over or forget it. It's a hard life.

[stansdds]

Reformat or give up, those are your only options with that much damage to the operating system. And with that much malware being found, I'd say odds are very good that there is more of it embedded in the operating system and the anti-malware programs either can't find them or the malware tells the anti-malware there is nothing wrong with the computer.

[JSpal]

If your friend just doesn't want to lose old data, you could buy a second harddrive, install XP on that, then use his old XP drive as a data drive, delete all the windows folders, pray that nothing mailicious got through that is going to infect his new install.

[winslow33]

Yeah I guess you guys are right, I'll never get it all off. I'm goinng to give the options tomorow of "let me wipe it or leave it" and see what he wants to do. Assuming he's going to want his files off of it at least, will I be fine if I use safe mode to put in my thumb drive, or is there a high risk even in safe mode because its so bad?
thanks foy everyones imput!:ernae:

[Wulf190]

I love the Nuke and pave technique. Works every time!

[OBIO]

My sister-in-law's monitor went out on her system, so a friend loaned her his laptop...he rarely uses the thing..but his teenage son has been using it without Dad knowing about it until recently. Sis-in-law got the system home, hooked it up, fired it up and 45 mintues later it was still booting. So, she calls me and asked me what was the best way to get it running right again....I told her format and rebuild. She has no clue about doing that, so I go over, pick up the laptop, bring it home, pop in my ultimate XP boot cd, do some checking and found 16,688 pieces of malware/trojans/worms/virues. Nearly 4000 registry errors.

Took nearly 10 hours to reformat, reinstall XP, update it to SP3 and all recent updates, anti-virus, utilities to keep the system clean and running right.

OBIO

[winslow33]

Yeah I forgot to update: He let me nuke it, that ended my problems in a hurry. lol. Thanks for all the advice.