i have my nephews ibm thinkpad here with no disc drive attatched. it was only running xp pro sp1 but that was not really a problem as he was only given this system recently for messengering his little buddies. until i realised i could not get avg free or zonealarm installed as they said they required at least sp2, but his windows product key was coming back as invalid when i tried to install the service packs for him. i had it wired through a router with a built in firewall so i thought that would help protect it some until i worked something out. i had to remove the wireless router and he just plugged it straight into the cable modem and i think that's when his problems came from. it started off just hanging at an empty desktop background when shutting down until it had to be manually powered down by pressing the power button, then it started to give an error message when starting up that winlgn.exe had a problem and had to close quickly followed by windows explorer doing the same. i found avast free would install after trying a couple of other free anti virus' and it asked to restart to do a full scan. during the scan i seen a couple of trojan horses and loads of win32:virtob virus' and stupidly must have deleted something important (winlgn or a registry key maybe)as now when the system starts up it just logs straight back off when pressing enter at the log in screen. i tried to make a bootable usb pen drive but i don't know if the machine is capable of booting from usb (don't know when it was made). when i go to the boot bios option it looks like this : (when expanded) -removable devices legacy floppy drives -hard drive ibm-dara-206000-(pm) cd-rom drive network boot intel (r) boot agent version 4.0.17 when i choose the external device it just boots up as normal so i take it the floppy is the only external device it means, so i don't think it can boot from a usb but i just may not be doing it correctly. i am stumped about how to go any farther. i was thinking about getting a loan of an external disc drive but would it not need installed first before it would get recognized by the boot menu ? i thought the network boot option sounded promising but i don't know much about it, whether you need to install something on both systems first or even if it would work if the machine can't be logged into, i'll go and read up on this just now. i am in real need of some help here, any pointers would be well appreciated. i have an external plug and play hard drive i don't know if i could format that in any way to install a new operating system maybe someone could advise me on that also.
Hi ballboy88 You should be able to boot from a USB. Removable device = USB Uh oh... you have been infected by the deadly file infector Virut/Virtob. Even though this is one of the worst pieces of malware out there, it can easily be prevented with a good antivirus. It would seem that you need to format and reinstall Windows... Hope your problem is solved! Best Regards
i tried to boot from usb but it just ignored it so i'm thinking when it only mention legacy floppy drives under the external devices that is only what it means. it was linux mint7.iso i tried booting from usb though as i couldn't get "petousb" to recognize either of my 2Gig usb pens when i tried to format them with it and that is the only way i could find to install windows from usb. if you know any other ways i would appreciate it. i have an extenal plug'n'play hard drive i was thinking of formatting and trying that as the external device but i don't really want to lose the data on it unless i know it will work.
Hey ballboy One sure way to work and save the data would be to remove the hard drive completely from the thinkpad and connect it to another computer (With a good antivirus!!). This way, you can copy the data (pictures/music) and format the entire hard drive when you're done with it. Best Regards
