hello everybody, i'm kinda new to the site. i found it while searching my problem on google. anyways, i have a compaq presario 2500 laptop with windows xp home edition sp1 installed. I had left my computer at the desktop screen to go do something and when I came back avast antivirus had come up with a message saying that one of my files was infected with a trojan. i believe the file was stored in the system or system32 folder. anyways, it had reccomended me to move the file to avast's "virus chest", so I did. and i went ahead and worked on my laptop as normal. then after shutting my computer down and starting it back up later in the day, i found that my laptop would not load any further than the blue "windows is starting up..." screen. i let it sit there for about 30 mins. so then i went to my desktop and started researching my problem on google. i tried going into safe mode, but it still gets stuck at the same screen. i tried the option for booting with the last good settings, and that didnt work. then I found an article on this site that reccomended doing an xp repair with xp install cd. i did that, step by step, and that still did not do the trick. it still hangs at the "windows is starting up..." screen, even in safe mode.
i'm getting a bad feeling that I am going to have to format the hd. There's alot of data on my laptop that I didn't have backed up, so I was wondering if you guys had any other ideas that I could try to get this thing booting properly again, before I have to resort to formatting. if there isn't anything i can do, is there a reccomended process that i can do to backup my data before formatting the hd and reinstalling? any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
i'm getting a bad feeling that I am going to have to format the hd. There's alot of data on my laptop that I didn't have backed up, so I was wondering if you guys had any other ideas that I could try to get this thing booting properly again, before I have to resort to formatting. if there isn't anything i can do, is there a reccomended process that i can do to backup my data before formatting the hd and reinstalling? any help or suggestions would be appreciated.