Hi,

I was wondering if anyone would give me some advice here. My desktop computer is currently infected with viruses and spywares. I have attempted to remove them even to the point of going to the safemode and run both the antivirus and lavasoft adware. They were detected and already removed. But they still appeared again. I even went to run msconfig and disabled all other startup programs. But still the viruses were founded by norton antivirus. I have made sure that all the antivirus and adware are up to date in virus definition. But now i gave up. So what i'm trying to do is reformatting my hard disk. I put in the windows XP CD to the CDROM. Then, restarted the computer hoping that i could do it from there at the rebooting stage. However, everything went ok til the stage where i was asked to press anykey to continue installing or repair or quit. I pressed any key and the next screen was with the following message.

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer..."

Very strange, Why is it saying that since it could load up the windows XP OS?

Any ideas? your help is greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance and look forward to hearing from you.Sounds like the virus is in the restore files. Turn off system restore and rerun your AV from safe mode. You can turn system restore back on when you come up clean.Thank guys for your reply.

It's not that old really. It's seagate Barracuda. It's gone worse now. What i did was when rebooting the computer, i press SHIFT+F8 to go to Safemode, but instead of selecting Safemode, i SELECTED the choce of "last known good configuration". Then, i went to load the windows. All i could see from the screen is just the background with nothing on the screen at all. Furthermore, there is no START button as what we usually see when the windows XP loaded up. What should I do now?

The reason i selected the last known good configuration was i THOUGHT since i was unable to reformat the harddisk, by going for that selection i could restore my computer to the stage where there was no viruses. I guess that's my mistake. I'm still learning.

Thank you in advance and look forward to your help.
I would run the hard drive diagnostics from the manufacturer's web site as well.Thank you to both Mac and GX1_Man for your helps.

Yes, that's right. I could not be able to view all the desktop icons nor the taskbar.

May i ask how to download the program from the link you recommended me to since i can't access to IE browser from the desktop.

Is there anyway of getting AROUND this?

Maybe it's my mistake to have chosen the "Last known Best configuration" option.

But thank a lot guys.

Thank you in advance and look forward to hearing from you.Hi, Mac

Alright, I'll do that. Just wanna check with you if i do it right. Once it's saved onto floppy disk. i have to get the troubled computer to reboot it from the floppy disk so that it would run the program on the disk. Is that right?

May i ask how to get to the BIOS configuration so that i can change the reboot order in order to reboot from the floppy disk?

Thank you in advance and I'll keep you posted.There is a key or key sequence to get into BIOS/setup when the computer starts, before the Windows logo. Since you never provided your computer or motherboard make/model we have to guess. Dell uses F2, many iBM's use F1, many generic boards use the Delete key. It should say on screen when it starts booting.

Yes, just download the floppy files and then either unzip them to a floppy or double click on the file to createt a floppy. The filename will tell you what you need to do. If it ends in .exe just double click on it.