Won't ghost after virus

I have an Acer Aspire 1520. I got a virus which was causing fits to remove. Because i was giving the laptop to my husband, I decided to just reimage the hard drive, hence cleaning the entire thing out and ridding it of the virus as well. I have done it in the past with no problem whatsoever.
There are three disks involved here: the initial boot disk, which readies the machine to ghost, the second, which is the first half of the ghost image, and the third, which is the rest of the ghost image. Now comes the problem: I have never been able to get past the second disk. Sometimes it gets all the way to the point where it says to insert the third disk, sometimes the initial boot disk freezes up, sometimes it just blinks blank screen on the initial disk. The thing just shuts off anywhere from the beginning of the first disk to the beginning of the third one. While it was running even with the virus, it never shut off. Very weird.
I can't do the "alt/F10" combo either - nothing at all comes up. I've even tried with a bootable XP disk, and just get blinking black screen. Any thoughts? The virus, if i recall the name properly, was "vuvlo" or something similar. Thanks for any ideas!