cannot access laptop at all

Good morning. I'll keep this brief for now. I have laptop which is about 4 years old and which runs Vista. It's been pretty reliable so far but my daughter has been using it recently and I think (from observations and conversations with friends) that it has picked up a virus. It suddenly started to shut down or reboot for no reason. It has Norton 2011 IS on it but there were no warnings.

By the time she brought it to me it wasn't booting at all but was coming up with the blue screen message that says that windows has been shut down to prevent damage to the machine. I managed to get in via safe mode and did a system restore which I thought was going to do the trick but when Norton did it's update (which it had not been able to do for a few days) it was only able to download the new databases but not to apply them. (Thats why I think it may be a virus). Then I got the blue screen message again. The only other thing I have been able to do is a checkdisc /f repair which observably did some correcting but hasn't completely worked. A few more trys has left me unable to boot up at all.

We got the machine from PC World and therefore have a disc which we let me into repair /restore options (which is how I did the above) or which will let me do a destructive reinstallation. However I have no disc to boot up from.

I therefore cannot do any of the tests I know I should do before opening a new thread and cannot post any logs. Sorry about this but I can't think of what to do and I do think this is a virus at work. Is my first step a system disc to at least boot up?

Thanks

 

It's been a week but I have had no replies. I hope I am not wasting peoples time but I have been doing a bit more work and can at least share the following.

Norton IS 2011 is installed on the laptop in question and I have found out that the disc also functions as a bootable system recovery tool. Great except that although the machine will boot up as far as allowing the choice of language to work in it then crashes out to the famous blue screen and the "windows has been shut down to prevent damage...".

On advice from a friend I have also been able to boot up by downloading the Ubuntu OS as a boot disc so I am now actually doing this on the affected machine. If I can actually boot up using a different OS that suggests to me that the problem is not hardware but is a virus as if it were corrupted system files they should have been fixable when I used the system recovery disc we produced earlier when the machine was working.

That said there have been problems booting up even with Ubantu. Sometimes it works fine and the desktop appears and has all the icons that will let me access the system. However sometimes not. Not sure what this signifies.

In addition I don't think I can run any anti virus etc when the machine is running under Ubantu. I guess I could back stuff up and reinstall but if it is malware I would like to be able to root it out if I could and just carry on as before.

Hope someone can help