Thread: Rescuing an XP netbook

Hi,

One of my friends has an Advent netbook. God knows what she's done to it (other than downloading Cougar Town off dodgy websites for which she deserves everything she gets ).

It seems to boot up okay and goes through the Windows XP startup onto the Welcome screen but after that I just get the background with no start menu or any way of doing anything. I've tried booting in safe mode but no difference. When I try to Ctrl+Alt+Del it tells me "Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator".

As it has no **/*** drive I'm thinking it might be possible to create a USB rescue disk from my old XP desktop and boot from that. I've had a search and come up with this but it seems more complex than I exected.

Has anyone had to do anything like this? Any pointers would be appreciated.

Dom

Can you use Win+E to run explorer or Win+R to bring up a Run dialog?
If not, I'd probably wipe it and start again as it sounds like you have a rootkit installed.
If you can get to a point where you can run things, then malwarebytes would be a start or possibly combofix if it's really bad.

Cheers for the reply.

I tried pretty much every key combination that I could think of, the only one that did anything was Win+L to lock the workstation. I can see the mouse pointer but no menus or desktop icons of any kind.

I had thought it might be a nasty little virus but was hoping I'd missed the obvious.

Dom