Avast Quarantine command brings blue screen

[Hanky]

After clicking on the quarantine option for some malware that Avast found my screen went blue. On restart all I see is a blinking curser.
Totally doa however hd is still spinning.
My sys is win xp pro latest ver. On a Dell p4 chip.
Any ideas? I'm considering putting the install disc and trying
Scandisc or fdisc.
Thank you for your advice
Hank

[Bob_S]

The windows install disk should give you a repair option. That will replace any missing or corrupted files.

[SCone]

You AV probably quarantined a system file.....

[Hanky]

My win disc boots up but when I choose recovery option it ask for a recovery floppy which I do not have, I can follow install option to the point where it ask for installation or recovery console. Recovery console only gives me dos prompt. I wonder if I can reinstall windows without losing all my files?

[JohnT]

Where's Rich (Rson)?

[bburton]

Can you boot up in the Safe mode and unquarantine whichever files the system needs to boot regularly?

[picman]

maybe this will help:
How to start the System Restore tool by using the safe mode option with the Command prompt in Windows XP

[Hanky]

Originally Posted by bburton

Can you boot up in the Safe mode and unquarantine whichever files the system needs to boot regularly?

No Sir, currently not bootable all I can get is a flashing dash line.
I tried recover form the install disc butit ask for a recovery floppy which I do not have. If I bypass recovery and go to repair then I wind up with a dos prompt and only the standard available dos commands. I'm wonderring if a reinstall will kill all of my files and if that is even possible considerring
my install cd is sp1.

[Flea77]

Boot to your XP CD, at the first prompt, select Install, then it will look for current installations. When it finds them (if it finds them), it should display several options, one of which is a Repair. That repair (the second one) reinstalls XP over the top of the one you already have. It will find some of your drivers, and wipe out all of your updates, but your applications and documents etc will all be there.

Note 1: Do not be worried if after the repair process several things do not run anymore, they most likely will require updates to be run on Windows first.

Note 2: Your AV will most likely be toast after the repair so be ready to reinstall it.

Note 3: If Windows does not find a previous installation of Windows, most likely your boot.ini file is corrupt and will have to be replaced/repaired before you can run the Windows Repair.

Allan

[mgphotos]

If you have another computer you could slave the corrupt hard drive and hack the restore points. That should get it back going.

Mark

[Rson]

pm me if you cannot fix it....got a few monsters ahead of you but i should be able to fix it.

[Hanky]

Thank you! I am grateful for the helpful advise.
So far negative results on the reinstall, once the temp files are
Loaded to the C: drive the machine reboots to square one and the process
tries to start over. I'm really hopeful that the drive can be slaved and
files recovered. A clean install is in the plans eventually.

[Hanky]

Okay I followed some dos commands I found on a forum and now I have reinstalled the basic OS, tomorrow I will upate sp2 and 3 and then try to recover my outlook expess email. Again I really apreciate all the help and advice Thank you one and all.

[Hanky]

Just a note I found a real nice helpful forum for Computers,
Tek-Tips Forums and was given this site by Avast for reinstall advice,
How-to repair Windows XP
I've loaded sp 3 however 90 % of my pictue files and all the desktop files are still missing.
I hope my Outlook express will recover as there were many emails needed for immigration proceedings. As for the programs I really dont care about them.
Thank you