Need help, another Dell gone bad

[garzzar]

Its a gateway btw i thought he said dell
ok heres the deal, my roomates computer went nuts after a prank went wrong, i think it was some crazy ass virus that decide to be evil and pretty much ruin the laptop

windows will boot up no start menu no bar no icons and it wont read a CD of any kind (not even the recovery or windows). i ran it in safe mode and nothing i havent had a chance to run BIOSS which probably wont help any, i can open task manager but i dont know what to do with it because its not my comp and i have no idea what he ha installed, so if i can get any suggestions at all, i would appreciate it.

[nevermind1534]

If you can go into the bios, make sure that boot from CD is the first thing in the boot order. Sometimes it isn't. A virus in windows shouldn't effect booting from a CD.

[Luke122]

In the task manager, is Explorer.exe running? If not, then click on file, then run, and try to start it.

From that run command, you should also be able to run MSCONFIG. In there, disable everything on the startup tab. On the services tab, select, "hide microsoft services", then disable everything that is left over, and reboot.

See if that gets you to a desktop with a taskbar and such.. if so, it's a corrupt program/service.

If you have the Windows CD, drop it into the drive, and go into the task manager, then click file, run, and type this:

sfc /scannow

It will scan the windows installation and try to replace all the necessary files.

Last option is a reinstall, but let see if we can get it going before we jump to that.

[Luke122]

Ooops.. just reread that, and noticed the part about the CD not working. In the bios, does the CD drive appear in the list of installed drives? If not, it could be a hardware problem.

Some laptops have removable cd drives, if this one does, try to remove it and reinsert it. It's possible that it's just a bad connection (or not inserted completely).

[garzzar]

thnx alot ill try it when i get back to my house, im in class right now +rep

[garzzar]

i got the laptop runnin again last night thnx to every1 for the help