Upon running Malwarebytes (after making sure to have the latest, 2/11, update and the latest database), I saw a few flagged files, thought nothing of it, and went about doing household chores. When I came back the computer had rebooted. I thought this strange since Malwarebytes doesn't do an auto reboot. I ran it overnight and, once again, awoke to a rebooted computer. I ran it again, left for moment, and when I came back it was trying to reboot but failed. Dead. Fried. Kaput.
Once again, I have no reason to believe a virus is involved. Or, if one is, that the two episodes are related. I relay the info just in case. Here's the thread I started on it: http://www.geekstogo...PU-t229688.html
I booted into WinRe and the Vista recovery tools said it passed all the tests (nine of them) and therefore has no suggestions on what to do, even after remotely accessing Microsoft. I was able to go to advanced recovery options and view a dozen system restore points but each one failed. Gateway has a recovery drive (x:) showing in gray, but somehow I couldn't access it. I had also previously made a special "system recovery disk" but apparently that's just software like what I just described, not some emergency boot disk. It basically allows you to restore to factory settings. Forget that. Too much stuff on the computer that I can't kill.
I should add that I always booted into my own settings where I have no password. Whenever I chose "administrator", it required a password but none of the ones I tried worked. I don't recall even making a password.
I could boot into safe mode with command prompt and had full access to both my c and x (recovery) drives. All my stuff seemed intact. I could even run a chkdsk-- no errors. Heck, I could even edit the registry. But I couldn't boot.
Then I read about the console tools to fix these things. Bad move on my part. At first I tried fixmbr which said it completed successfully immediately. I rebooted. Didn't affect anything.
I got back to the DOS prompt and tried fixboot. It took some time, but said it completed successfully. Rebooted. Didn't affect anything.
I got back to the DOS prompt and tried rebuildbcd. It said no windows installation was found.
I ran scanos and it came up with no windows installation anywhere on the system as well.
At that point I was down to bcedit:
bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
c:
cd boot
attrib bcd -s -h -r
ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
bootrec /RebuildBcd
It said it found a windows installation so I rebooted and crossed my fingers. The result was that instead of saying Windows was corrupted and asking it I wanted to repair it, it went to the 'usual' boot choices (safe mode, safe mode with command prompt (which I chose), etc.) Safe mode scrolls all the files it loads. The last one I saw was crcdisk.sys before it again choked.
This time I can't boot into anything. Nothing works. I then tried to use the system restore disk I had made and asked to restore from a given point. All my restore points are now gone, as it my ability to get back to the DOS prompt.
Now what?