[Youngest78]

Disaster has struck and I’m sinking fast!
I have a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop. The other night I was downloading from pirate bay and was attacked by Trojans. The siege was swift and I was crippled in no time. I tried running my anti-virus things (AVG) but it didn’t really help, even after I’d logged in on safe mode and ran it in that. Eventually I tried a system restore. I left it running for a matter of hours but it looked to be frozen whilst ‘restoring files’. So…..I switched off the computer. Absolutely stupid move, I presume, but I couldn’t see another way.

Now when I log on the internet isn’t available and when I try and go to system restore it doesn’t appear to be valid, it won’t give me the opportunity to do it. It comes up with an error message that reads: “The application or DLL C:\WINDOWS\System32\mshtml.DLL is not a valid windows image. Please check this against your installation diskette.”


This message appears with some other stuff since I cancelled the restoration.

Am I screwed? I don’t have an installation CD. Is there anything I can do?

 

[rosiesdad]

The easiest most simple route to go is to reinstall Windows. Since you dont have a cd, removing the crap that crippled your computer may be a job for malware experts.
You could post in the forum for removing malware.
You may not get much sympathy if you admit to being on a pirate site.

 

[Youngest78]

Although I very rarely download music, I'm not expecting any sympathy. If nothing else, I have been trigger happy. I'm not whining about trojans, I know that's my own fault, it's all the shenanigans that happened with the restore that I'm mystified by.

So, you think that only in addressing the malware issue can I tackle the wider problem of restoring the system files?

 

[seriously]

backup everything you need and do a system recovery from the dell recovery partition. (ctrl+F11 at boot time when you see the dell logo and blue bar).

 

[Youngest78]

Cheers - when you say back up what i need what does this include? What will i stand to lose?