[bigcheesel]

Windows XP will not boot. After the first "Dell" screen, a blinking underscore appears on a blank page. The hard drive and all hardware are fine, as confirmed by friend computer wizards. This is without doubt a software problem.

I burned SLAX (a linux derivative) to a live CD and set my BIOS to boot from CD. SLAX is fantastic, but I wonder if I can restore windows to a previous point or investigate my boot sequence using SLAX's file manager (SLAX is great by the way)

There is a high likelihood that I have a trojan.

Side question: Would you recommend trend micro antivirus over norton? is there another antivirus option you'd recommend more highly than both of these?

[Mumbodog]

Will safe mode load? If it does you can run xp's system restore from there. No I don't think you can do this with slax.

If you think you have an infection, I suggest you remove the hard drive and attach it to another system and scan the drive to remove any infections from the file system. Return it to the original system and see if it will boot now.

If it is infected system restore may contain the infection also, you would need to know when you were infected and pick a restore date before that happened or you will re-infect the system.

trend micro antivirus over norton?

Try AVG or Avast

[TheOutcaste]

The blinking underscore often happens when the boot sector is corrupted. The MBR code thinks it's OK, so passes control to the Boot Sector, but it gets lost, and you get no error messages.
Try booting with the XP CD into the recovery Console, and run FIXBOOT. Do not run FIXMBR, as that will overwrite the Dell PBR that gives access to the diagnostics and Recovery partition.