Win XP black screen with white cursor / arrow on boot
Just had a very serious problem with my wife's laptop. The system crashed so we shut down, but were unable to restart windows xp. It went through the usual hardware tests and windows xp boot screen only to lock up with the login background and a white cursor. There were recently some virus problems on the computer that I had fixed & prior to the crash I had cleaned the comp using win xp's own tools and system mechanic so at first I was suspicious taht I had muc-ked up some system files somehow.
First thing I did was to use the Windows XP recovery tool (from WinXp home boot/installation disc) and also repaired the boot sector in a fit of desparation. All this succeeded in doing was to get rid of the WinXP backround and after a boot I was now left with just a black screen and white arrow.
I then searched the internet and came up with quite a few other similar problems though no solution. My biggest problem was to get in and back up my wife's work for her, which I eventually did by installing a second version of windows in a separate directory (c:/windows2) and booting into this version, which allowed me to back up essential data without destroying the old user profiles (note if you install over an existing windows version you will lose all desktop & my docs data!).
So first problem solved. I was now suspicious that the computer had been infected with the Sasser virus as it had been mentioned in several threads (and it was better than telling my wife I had ****ed up her laptop and nearly lost all her work), however further research into the virus suggested that it simply restarted the computer intermittently & replicated and did not actually crash the system.
Anyway, I delted & reinstalled partitions, formatted the HD and reinstalled Windows XP home. Then I reinstalled related generic laptop drivers from origiinal cd, installed Norton Antivirus 2003 and logged onto the internet to update Windows Xp and NAV. Note at this point that I hadn't started up the Windows XP firewall on my dial up connection (doh!). The computer began to turn itself off after about 10 mins of work giving an RPC error window and 1 min countdown to restart (note I was logged onto internet each time this happened). So I started up the MS firewall which somehow stopped the RPC error & associated restart and allowed me to download NAV updates.
To my horror when I scanned the computer after updating NAV it brought up no less than 28 instances of the Sasser virus (WTF! I had just formatted!). Many of which could not be cleaned. It also suggested that the NAV executable had been infected!
Anyway, to cut a long staory short I will be back and beavering away to cull this darned virus attack this evening after having left the pc running to update WinXp last night.
Anyone else had a similar problem? Is this a new strain of Sasser? Or an existing strain that I have aggravated by fiddling around with the PC with only mild security?
I'm very glad they caught the flucker who wrote it. Now perhaps Micro****e might wake up and realise that Windows remains highly flawed and spend a bit of their huge profit on building an OS that is worth the price tag. Otherwise they're just going to have more problems, more source code leaks and start to lose mkt share to Linux etc.. and that is no bad thing but given the prevalance of windows a major virus attack along the Sasser line that is built to be os/pc damaging could be devastating.