They gave me a Compaq Presario CQ60 laptop. It has Vista Home and it is full of viruses.
-I cannot boot in safe mode (it hangs)
-The built in CDROM is damaged
-I cannot boot from my external USB cdrom drive. Whenever I try to, the computer reads from the external cdrom for several seconds while the screen remains black, then goes on booting from the hard drive.
What can I do to repair that laptop? As it is I cannot even reinstall Windows :smack:
if it came into my shop we would toss in a new DVD drive and go. As an option if you have another computer to work with you can build a bootable USB memory stick copy of windows, that’s what we use for netbooks.
I could be wrong and this is just me guessing, but it sounds like the computer is not finding bootable media in the usb cdrom drive.
I am guessing you specifiy it as the first boot device in your bios (because it does attempt to read from it)?
How can I do that?
I’d try the following: remove the HD and plug it in as a secondary drive on a PC with a lot of good malware scanning stuff (like malwarebytes). Your laptop drive might need a simple adapter to connect to a standard HD connector. Or if you have a suitable external drive enclosure (with suitable adapter).
Boot and run all the malware scanners on the laptop drive. Copy the malware install software to the drive afterwards. Include HijackThis here.
[Cross fingers]
Put back in the laptop. Disable all the networking stuff. Boot, install the malware scanner software, scan.
[/Uncross fingers]
But I do this sort of thing routinely and I’m careful about a bunch of details. An amateur might not do each step perfectly.
If you have another machine on a LAN with the laptop that has a working CDROM, you can install using that. Stick the CDROM in that machine, and share it to your network. Access the share from the laptop, and click the setup.exe located there.
It should copy all the setup files from the CD to the laptop’s hard drive, and then reboot into a Windows installer. From there you can install normally.
As the poster above said you can also make a bootable USB flash drive. Generally all you need to do nowadays is copy the contents of the install disc to the root directory of the flash drive.
I booted using a Hiren USB stick. Details on how to create one here: Hiren's BootCD From USB Flash Drive (Pen Drive) » www.hiren.info
I am still interested on how to transfer a Windows CD on a USB stick.