So some friends came over for dinner, which was a culinary delight btw, but they brought their laptop with them for me to look at. It was full of crap and as far as I could see a piece of amazon software called Audio download manager that could only be uninstalled in safe mode. I left the laptop on during dinner and came back to it afterwards. After Dinner booted to safe mode and started to remove all the **** that was installed, the three version of AVG etc etc. ready for running CCCleaner to decide whether I should suggest a clean install. XP btw. During the uninstallation of a random program that they had never used the battery went. ****!! plugged in the laptop and tried rebooting, BSOD encountered on normal boot and safe mode. Left the laptop to cool down incase it was an overheating problem, BSOD. I have recently had a clean out and it appears as though I have binned my XP disc. Does anyone know where I can get one or where to find an ISO online. Am going to attempt a repair before I start taking the ram out etc.
As I understand it, it's perfectly ok to download an ISO of windows via Bit-torrent or something, as long as your key is legal. Or have I just swore and now about to be banned for suggesting such a thing?
Skyphox, you are completly right, it is legal to download the media, but you need a key to install it legally However I prefer the official downloads than the bit-torrents, as you don't know if anyone has tweaked that download with a little bit of malware, but that may just be my security side coming out to play
You make a valid point. Grabbing any old ISO of piratebay or something would probably be a bad idea. However, sites like demonoid have good user feedback and you can usually gauge the safety of a file from them. I've had to do this a few times with fixing people's PCs (can you believe one person decided to delete everything on their restore partition??!) I usually just look for ones advertised as unaltered. But you are right, always a risk.
I think I have found what the problem is but I just cant fix it. It's to do with the install of AVG: http://www.spywareremovalhelp.org/spyware-removal-help/how-to-fix-avgidseh-sys-errors.html I have tried booting via the optical drive and using a usb stick, The optical drive is probably faulty and the usb doesn't appear in the boot list. Grrrr.
I'd have my doubts about that blog -- notice how every fix they mention uses a registry cleaner called Wise PC doctor? Bluescreenview will allow you to read crash dumps, though I take it you've already noted the BSOD since you're looking at specific .sys file on a blog. If you can get to a command prompt I'd suggest running a simple chkdsk -- you mention the drive was active at the time of the power failure so something may have gone awry with the disk. I know it may sound unlikely that a chkdsk will resolve a BSOD but believe me, it's a possibility. I've fixed them this way before on several occasions -- obviously YMMV, though.
So I managed to borrow a USB optical drive from work. Renamed the AVG folder and also the drivers. Now freezes on Mup.sys So I think it's possibly a corrupt registry.
Ok, so found the Dell recovery console, Ctrl + F11 when Dell banner displays, am now attempting a restore. My friend said there was nothing on the machine that they wanted to keep. So we'll see how that goes.
