My parents have a 5+ year old HP desktop (might be closer to 10 years old, actually). It has Windows XP sp3, 2gb of ram, and around an 80gb hard drive. I believe they have Mcafee AV. Yesterday my dad was surfing the internet when the AV told him it discovered some viruses and it deleted them. Today, however, when we went to turn on the computer, it would not start up. The computer goes through the initial diagnostics, very quickly, and then goes to a black screen with a blinking cursor. It doesn't move from there.
I've already used a Linux live CD and everything from the CD worked fine. I was able to connect to the internet, the monitor displayed everything fine, etc. I was even able to mount my hard drive and view the files on it. So it doesn't seem to be a problem with the RAM, video card, hard drive.
I've used the Windows Recovery Console and had it write a new boot sector. However, when I tried to get it to give me a new master boot record, it warned me that this may leave my partitions inaccessible so I did not go along with that.
I've tried using a program called ERD Commander 5, which allowed me to do a minimal system restore, but that did not fix the problem. I also used the program to scan system files for corruption but it did not find any.
Any suggestions on what I can try further, save for a fresh install of Windows or something else that will wipe my data and programs, is greatly appreciated.
