Possible virus...

[pcrobot]

Hey all,

Yesterday, when I came home, I found my pc off. (My PC's specs, see sig.) Supposedly nobody had done it. So I booted it up, and a window popped up saying "McAfee AntiVirus hadn't started properly, and it needed be restarted. If the same error came up again, McAfee needed to be reinstalled." So, I rebooted it, and typed in the password to log in to the desktop. The screen flashed then restarted! The cycle went on several times, so I just turned it off. I'm asuming that it's a virus, which is a BIG pain because I have a bunch of stuff I need to do on it. What should I do? (I just backed up last Thursday, so I won't lose a lot of info.)

Thanks a lot!

 

[xcspr]

To me it sounds more like a possible hardware problem to be honest.

Try the following:
-Booting the PC in safe mode.
-Clean the memory dimms (simms?)

Sometimes, if you don't have proper energy back up equipment, electricity will do some nasty things on your PC. If you had a firewall that was working properly (and updated), and you have a "always on" internet connection while you where away (and I am speculating here) chances are a "threat" did not enter. (unless you were using a file sharing program or the like).

So...simply put: Try to boot in safe mode, see what happens or simply open it up and give some love to the variuos hardware there.

If you would have to reformat the PC, there are ways to NOT loose the data. Just come back here and these fine people will help you.

 

[pcrobot]

Re:

I tried booting in to safe mode, but anytime I pushed (or held down) F8 it would beep. Do you think having it dual-loading with Linux is effecting the boot options? Also, how do I reformat without losing data?

 

[molsen]

you cant reformat without losing data. reformatting clears your hdd

 

[The_likely_lad]

Your best bet would be, presuming you have the disk, is to delete windows and reinstall it, this saving all your data.
I think the command line is "deltree win" or something like that. Its bee n a while since i done it.

 

[Osiris]

go into safemode with networking and download msconfig cleanup. Open msconfig and find which entry is mcafee. Then use msconfig to delete the entries all but mcafee and then reboot, if that dont work, do a windows repair