Ok, I have inherited a problem.

A friends daughter found P2P and music downloads. Also, as might be imagined, a couple of trojans and 3-4 virus.

The virus's were easy, and one trojan came out easily, but the last one was a presistant cuss. Unfortunately, I had to leave before it was completely cleaned, and made the comment (stupid, stupid, stupid) that if was me I would reformate the drive and do a clean install.

About 8:30 pm, I get a call.....from guess who: "My computer is all %*&$#*." I went down stairs and found the poor box stuck in some sort of loop and not going anywhere.

What he had done, I think??? (from observation and questions) Was to install Windows XP over the top of Windows XP, without partitioning or reformating. Not repair mind you but a complete new installation. He only has a 10 gig hard drive ( about 9.5 available), and I think (?) that his hard drive is full.

Right now, you can't boot to anything, including safe mode. It automatically returns to setup and hangs at the same spot. I can't get it to boot from the cd, so I can't even delete the partition and reformate. ( which is what I would do if I could) Cntrl+Alt+Del does not work. Nor does Cntrl+Esc or any other combination of keys I have tried.

After about 3 hours of trying every thing I could think of, I feel like hacking his box, but my wife has hidden the axe, and I don't want to possibly damage any of my swords.

Any one have any nondistructive cures for this little problem.

By the way, it is a
AMD3 @ 350mhz
194+ megs of ram
10 gig HD
and the original XP was an up grade of Windows 98