Can anyone help me?
 

I got a virus on my PC and now I can't see task manager or run the command prompt...

any ideas?

yikes, can you boot into safe mode?
(since you said task manager, I am assuming windows xp?)

Can you revert back to a saved configuration in a situation like that?

What about using an old Windows 98 boot disk to start up a virtual RAM drive and run some utilities from there?

Hail Mary passes at best; my heart goes out to ya!

Good luck!

Cheers guys,

Yes, its XP, whenever I go to the CMD prompt I get a message saying that only the administrator can run it, I am the admin!

Yeah - I can revert to previous OS states but will lose a few installs...


Anyway - I was expecting the usual "This is not that kind of virus forum - thicko!"

Are you running the command prompt from the "Run" menu of XP? Try booting up your machine from a virtual RAM drive via the Win98 boot disk.

Windows XP will not have had an opportunity to load as you will need to set your BIOS to boot to the floppy first (or USB pin drive, or CD, whatever you wish) and the RAM drive will be loaded from that media. It's a piece of cake as in Win98 there was only 1 boot floppy and with XP there are 6! Maybe the virus can be subverted this way? Again, just a guess.

You can find it and more here:

http://oldfiles.org.uk/powerload/bootdisk.htm

The question I would ask is, what are those installs, can they be re-applied, and how important is it to get the virus off your system...

Good luck Drammy!

Thanks Alex,

I should have been more specific - I've already got rid of the virus...

BUT, its left me with no access to cmd and task manager. Anyone know how I can change it back?

Just format and re-install. Even if your virus checker says its cleaned everything they can leave dormant nasty suprises that do the most un-detectable of things.

One of the main reasons I have an OS ONLY drive is for such problems, so I can simply ghost a working image of the boot drive back over it and everything is hunky again.

Backup any essential info, format, reinstall, jobs a goodun :)

tom

I use Acronis so I won't need to re-install.

The virus is since the latest backup so the backup is clean. I'd just rather not - it was only a Trojan so there is unlikely to be any bad residue. Everything is working perfectly and my non-OS drives are not affected, so I'd rather just re-enable them.

There must be a way to do it - cause its simply undoing what the virus did...

are you logging in as Admin or something else? If something else try logging in as Admin and see if you can run them. If you have forgotten the password for the admin user you are pretty much screwed.

If that doesn't work I'd just role back to a previous state.

Have a look in your control panel->admin tools and at the user accounts and create a new login account with admin permissions or modify the permissions on your current account if need be?

Drammy, you may have some file corruption there.
since you can't access a command prompt from a normal boot, try booting to safe mode (with command prompt option), launch a command prompt and run sfc /scannow - this is a program that scans all of your system files to check for issues and fixes them (if you use the /scannow variable)

Thanks Doc - I'll try that.

As for the admin account - my user account is the only admin account on the system (in fact other than guest it is the only account on my system)

Damn it, Drammy. Didn't you know my ESP is on the fritz lately? How the hell am I supposed to read your mind without ESP? :wink:

Any luck?

What happened to your ESP?

Got something to try but will have to wait till later...