Solved Problem Booting

[thisisallivegot]

I'm having a problem with my laptop that I hope someone can help me with. I don't know all that much about computers, so if I leave out any necessary information, please let me know and I'll try to provide it.

It started today when I got a virus. I have no idea what the virus was, but I know that by the time I had gotten to it, it all but destroyed my computer. I could not get into any system applications to get rid of the virus, including my antivirus software, or system restore. A friend told me to go to safe mode and use system restore from there, so I did that. I restored my system to an earlier date, when the virus couldn't possibly have been there.

However, when I attempted to restart my computer after the system restore, a message came up that said "BOOTMGR is compressed. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart". I pressed this several times, but I keep coming up with the same message. I saw other threads with the same basic problem, and the advice was to reinstall windows through the cd. However, my laptop is a very cheap model and does not have a cd drive, so this is not an option.

I am very limited on money, so I'm hoping I can get some help here without having to take my computer to a shop. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello thisisallivegot, welcome to Vista Forums!



This is a last resort but if you have nothing on the PC you don't want to lose then give it a try though this may not be an option on your PC.

Some PC builders add a "Recovery Partition" to the PC when it's built that can be used to recover the machine back to its original factory state.

I wrote the instruction below a while back for HP PCs but the principal is the same, if it'll work for your machine, though yours may use a difference F key, have a look to see what you can do with it.

Be sure to post back to let us know how it sorts out.

HP Recovery Center
Be advised: this will delete any data on the PC, this will take the machine back to the point when you first took it of the box.
The "HP Recovery Center" will give you the option to send to backup anything you
don't want to lose, so have backup media available to use if you choose this option.

With the machine off press the power button, as soon as you do that start tapping the F11 key.
It may take several attempts to do this, if the first attempt fails, try again.
That should take you to the HP Recovery Center. When there just follow the prompts.
It is pretty much self explanatory. From the time you boot into F11 (not counting
any backups you choose to make) you should be back on a working desktop in about
30 minutes. After it restarts just follow the prompts again to finish the process.

If your first option is system restore select no, which should take you to system recovery.
You want to try system recovery not system restore, unless you have good restore points!

 

[thisisallivegot]

After trying several other things which didn't work, I did eventually try this and it worked. The system even gave me a chance to save all my files to an external drive, so that I didn't lose anything. Thanks so much for your help.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello again, I'm so very happy for you; thanks for letting me know it worked for you.


Now get a good anti-virus program, have a look at the free program at the link below.

Avast Free Home Antivirus

NOTE: You must register this program even though it's free. The registration will be good for a year. After that, you must re-register. It is still completely free though.

A great antivirus program that auto updates the definitions and optionally the program itself. Has a VRDB (Virus Recovery Database) that you set to help in recovering from a virus if infected. It also includes anti-spyware and anti-rootkit protections. Full of other features.