PC will not boot

[RTB61185]

Hello all:

I have been having trouble our home PC. We recently hooked it up to the Internet for a few days without a firewall or any virus protection out of obligation. Stupid move. The computer began running slower and slower as it had come down with several viruses. I ran Ad-Aware SE Personal and another virus program...I believe it was called Watchdog. Anyhow, everything seemed to be in working order. The computer was running at normal speed again, so I shut down the computer and left it overnight. The next morning, I turned on the power switch, and a black screen was displayed saying something to the effect of "A fatal error has occured," and it gave me 4 options:
1) Boot in safe mode
2) Boot in safe mode with networking
3) Boot in safe mode with command prompt
4) Restore computer settings to last working configuration

No matter which of the 4 options I choose, it begins loading what appear to be the drivers and stops. I'm rather confused. The only thing I can think of is that maybe one of the drivers was deleted while running the virus scans? I know that is probably a 1 in a trillion chance, but it's the only feasible idea I can come up with. What should I do? Should I reset the BIOS? Reload Windows? Any ideas would be much appreciated

[Chaky]

Scenario 1 - Reinstalling windows would be safe move. It will resurrect your system and all of the data will remain on your HD. Additional software will have to be reinstalled too.

Scenario 2 - Formatting HD and reinstalling windows would be the safest move. This way you would kill all there is on the HD. Viruses, downloaded stuff, drivers and ALL data you have on your HD (or your ptimary partition).

If you have 2 or more HDs/partitions, I suggest you do the scenarion No. 1, find all useful data and back it up on other partition/HD and do the scenario No. 2.

Or you can do this with 1 HD/partition and back it up on DVD/CDs.

The choice is yours.

[madspook]

Got to be scenario 2 Re-format the hard drive and reinstall the O/S as the safest option. Before connecting to the net make sure you have antivirus software installed and you have backed up your system. I prefer to back it up to DVD just in case, although I do use a spare hard drive to recover my files on.