Infected BEFORE I could update definitions

[kmmcdanie]

Hello,

This has never happened to me before so I was hoping to get a little guidance. I was setting up a new Dell for a friend of mine and had installed Norton antivirus. I thought I had updated all of the definitions but perhaps not because when I went to download zone alarm I began to get warnings from norton that the pc was infected with 7 viruses that could not be repaired.

I hit quarantine and then it blue screened on me. Now I am getting random blue screen stop errors - always different.

I restored the system back to factory but it's still not right - will not let me reinstall norton and keeps crashing with a blue screen.

I guess the MBR is infected? I tried to use the Symantec online detection tool but as soon as I try to start it the system blue screens.

Any advice? I'm not quite sure where to go from here.

Thank you
Kathy

 

[bygeek]

If your Norton Antivirus really is up to date, try booting into Safe Mode and doing a full virus scan.

 

[jkupski]

IIRC, not very many modern viruses are resident in the boot sector. If by some chance you have one that actually is, pull out a DOS (or Win9x) boot floppy and run fdisk /mbr.

For future note: NEVER put a Windows box on the internet until it is fully patched--in fact, it's just plain bad practice to do so even with a fully patched system. If you must access the internet from an unpatched machine (i.e. you don't have a local WSUS server and need to download updates) do so with the machine behind a router, and do not access any sites other than Windows Update until the patching process is complete.