Some guy I work with brought in his home computer for repair that was absolutely taken over by spyware. Normally I don’t mind taking a look at friend and co-worker’s home computer for free, because usually it takes very little effort to clean up things, but this one I wish I wouldn’t have even touched.

It was a Dell Dimension 8110 that was so infected, it couldn’t even detect a USB drive so I could load some anti-virus software or establish an internet connection, even in safe mode. So I pulled out the HD to hookup to another machine to scan as a slave drive, it found a bunch of viruses and “repaired” about 50 problems. So I was hopeful that maybe it was in better shape to at least get some software installed. I installed the HD back into the Dell, to find out the Dell machine no longer could detect the Primary Disk 0 (hard disk). I tried severally different things, swapping out the IDE cable, making sure the jumper settings were correct, I even went as far as trying a different HD, no luck. So it led me to believe that maybe the IDE controller on the board was toast, I did some research and apparently it’s a pretty common problem and the only solution I found was to “wait it out, it will eventually start detecting the primary disk again”. I thought that was funny, so I pulled out everything from the board, and let it just hang out on my desk overnight. I came in the next day, put everything back together and it boots, no problem. Finds the HD and loads right up! unfortunately it was still taken over by spyware to a point where I decided to reinstall Windows.

Windows XP stuck in Safe Mode
This was where i ran into my biggest problem, while troubleshooting I had went into msconfig (Start -> Run -> “msconfig”) within the BOOT.INI tab and checked the /SAFEBOOT option under Boot Options, which basically sets the system to boot in safe mode without jamming on your F8 key while your system is booting. Problem was I never removed this option when I decided to re-install Windows. I came to find out, that although you completely reinstall XP it somehow keeps the bootcfg in memory and uses the options set in your previous installation.

So at the finally steps of the XP installation where your machine reboots and you are asked to set the language and all those settings, it would come to a halt and say “Windows XP Setup cannot run under safemode. Setup will restart now.” Which doesn’t really give you many options because this will happen each time you try to boot from your HD, since the XP installation is only partially complete.

Solution: change bootcfg options from Recovery Console

1. boot from the XP CD and into the recovery console.
2. Once you chose the number OS you want to repiar (usually 1) type in this command: bootcfg /list to see what was going on in the bootcfg.
3. Then enter the command bootcfg /rebuild and reenter the necessary info. If you’ve never done this, first you select the Windows installation to use and enter the corresponding number (default is “1″). Then it asks you to enter the load identifier. (Microsoft Windows XP Professional).
4. Finally, it will prompt you for the OS load options. Here you would type in:
   “/noexecute=optin /fastdetect“(without the quotes). Restarted the machine, and the setup continued normally.

Right now I’m reinstalling all his Dell drivers and migrating all his Documents and Settings back to the new installation. It’s been a nightmare with this Dell, and this guy is probably missing his computer, but at least it didn’t cost him anything and now I know that the bootcfg does not get reset during a fresh installation of XP.