I am having trouble with my laptop and Fixmbr,
First the stats and info;
Gateway laptop model 1625, circa 2008
OS- microsoft vista service pack 2 build 6002
Pro- AMD Turion 64 X2 mobile technology
Ram- 2Gb
HD- ? 220 Gb
Video card- ? Supposed to be ATI based
Sound card- ?
AV- until now I have been using McAfee internet security
(part of my problem is that device manager does not work)
The back story;
About 2 weeks ago while surfing the web I got a virus. Specifically Zeroaccess Trojan that Mcafee was good enough to tell me about. My first indication was a pop-up from McAfee stating that it was there and in order to fix the problem I would need to reboot. I rebooted only to have the same MSG. occur over and over I couldn't even ignore it. Well long story short after talking with Mcafee for an hour they said they could help me for a modest $90.00 fee. I was angry and decided to go it alone. I found instructions on how to remove the virus on-line at McAfee's own web site and folowed them to the letter. The last instruction given was to run the Bootrec /fixmbr command from the recovery console command prompt. I did this and rebooted my machine.
The issue; (#1)
Well no more virus pop-ups... Also no more internet connection, no sound, No device manager, almost nothing works in controll panel Most of my programs either fail to start or give me the following MSG, "The specified service does not exist as an installed service". Explorer will allow me to view and work with my files but will hang sometimes for a min in between every mouse click, and it takes almost 6 min to boot the machine. Windows boots but that is about all.
Fixes;
I have tried all the usuall channels for support. My vendor gateway has very little help for a model this old. Thinking that this was virus related I originally sought help at the viruses and malware forum where a very nice guy named Superdave was helping me. But As we worked on it it became clear to me that The issue was more about what I did to the boot record then the virus.
And I am afraid I stumped Dave. He had me run both the fixmbr and the fixboot commands again. We ran the windows start up repair utility as well as several cleanup and malware removal tools (from safemode which is the only place they will run) The logs of which are available if needed.
Finally He suggested I format and reload windows. Which I'd be only to happy to do, I had intended to all along but I can't because of this issue. That's another story suffice to say that is issue 2 which I may also need help with...
I'd be happy if someone could help me with the Bootrec issue. I have read on-line and here in this forum that running the fixmbr and fixboot commands on some dell notebooks is a bad Idea. Would this be true for gateway? Does gateway have a proprietary bootrecord, and if so can this be reversed? I am sorry for the length of this post if anyone could help me I would sincerely appreciate it!
