Boot Sector Virus

Hi all,

New to the forum but I have an older Gateway MX6920 laptop that I am trying to reinstall Windows XP due to what appears to be a Master Boot record virus. I have repartitioned the HDD with FDISK as well as FDISK /MBR to rewrite teh MBR, formatted the HDD and attempted to reload Win XP but with no success.

Once setup completes coping the files to theHDD and reboot to complete the setup process, I get the blue screen with an error ** STOP 0X0000007B which indicates that Ilikely have a Boot Sector Virus.

I have tried everything that I can think of nd find online and am running out of ideas.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I might wipe out theBoot Sector virus, so that I can proceed with reloading Win XP?

Accepted answers

All comments

finlux

Hello!

Stop code 0X0000007B, can also refer to hard drive issues or even hardware failure.

If you're convinced that yours is caused by a virus, then I'd suggest to format the entire hard drive - this will wipe everything including Boot Sectors & recovery partition, and any viruses. Install Windows from the recovery disks (or from a retail copy of XP).

If you have a spare hard drive lying around, try also to install XP on that - just to rule out a faulty hard drive.

Djwlbrn

Thanks for the advice~

While I do not know for sure that I have a Boot Sector virus, I suspect that I do since the reason that I was reloading XP was that I had some sort of other virus that was causing my machine to crawl. I've reviewed Microsofts posts (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103) on this error and there are definitely other possible causes but I do know that the drive is good. Being that I am working with a freshly partitioned and formatted drive, I suspect that any virus has been wiped out and there are no other issues as far as I can tell. I did come across one other post (http://www.cybertechhelp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=156593) that seems to have helped others with this error but my Gateway laptop does not have the same BIOS setting options that others mention. Within my BIOS, on the Advanced tab, the closest thing that I have is a "Large Disk Access Mode" which can be set to DOS or Other. Default was DOS and changing it to Other doesn't seem to have any positive impact.