Nasty problem...Conficker?

[Sledgehammer427]

okay, My AVG Antivirus is up-to-date, and everything was fine

I turn on my PC when I get home, and it goes through the start up...but, before it shows "Windows XP" with the scrolling bar under it, it shows the "sorry to inconvience you, but windows did not start properly, please shoose from the options below." with the typical start windows normally, last known good configuration, and the 3 safe modes.
any one I pick, it restarts itself, ending up with an endless cycle...
is it dead?
my moms sending me a CD with XP on it, and use it as a boot disc with a recovery module on it.
but Ive heard theres a conficker outbreak, and im a little paranoid cuz a PC at schools doing the same thing, and not one I am using.

[Reece]

Probably nothing to do with Conflicker but if it worries you then either format the drive or put in another pc setting the master to slave and when booting don't access the drive to view data etc just scan it!
If clean get any data you need from it then you can either attempt to repair it with a utility like Norton Disk Doctor or put it back into the original machine and boot from XP CD and try a repair, failing that a format might be the only way out. Sorry that is all I can recommend, hope it helps.

[Sledgehammer427]

thanks for the quick reply!
I'll hook it up to my girlfriends as a slave and attempt to fix/scan it
if that fails, I'll move my OS onto my 500 gig HD and hope for the best...
can you make a PC boot from an external HD?

[Castout]

Originally Posted by Sledgehammer427

I'll hook it up to my girlfriend as a slave and attempt to fix/scan it

I can't help deleting the s after girlfriend....
Sorry to hear about your problem. My Vista has been crashing from time to time too. I'm losing my temper to my PC

[Reece]

can you make a PC boot from an external HD

I think only if it is the first HDD with an active partition, you can boot from a CD & I have been told you can boot from a usb ram stick though I haven't tried it!

[AVGWarhawk]

I do not think it is conficker. Conficker is a worm that is nasty but it looks for your information more than anything. Yes, you can boot from CD. It almost sounds like the problem I had when my hard drive died. See if you can get into the DOS prompt screen and do a CHKDSK.

[kiwi_2005]

See if you can start pc in safe mode - hold down F8 on startup once in the menu choose safe mode or safe mode network in case u need to go on the internet. If pc loads into windows go to Control panel - System properties - Advanced - Startup & Recovery then uncheck 'Automatic Restart'. Then Ok it.

Go into msconfig: Start - Run - type in 'msconfig' and uncheck everything in the Startup Tab. click ok and restart PC

If pc loads up to windows normally then at least you know its some program that starts when windows loads that was causing your pc to restart automatically. You just have to find what program it is, shouldn't be hard if you recently installed some software. Otherwise if it still fails it could be a hardware problem and no tinkering in windows will fix it, but don't throw that HD away before you try this option I mention as it might be just a software issue.

[Sledgehammer427]

well I hooked it up to my Girl's PC and it took care of the problem automatically.

thanks for the help!