I use Avast and have good luck so far. Yesterday my Windows XP machine suddenly went to a black screen, then all sorts of characters appeared on the screen. I rebooted and the characters started up right away not giving a chance to boot up XP. I unplugged and then rebooted again, this time and every time I try to boot up I get stuck at Verifying DMI. I tried running recovery in console mode and when I run chkdsk I get an error message saying that the drive is corrupt.
I’m guessing that I have some kind of virus that trashed my MBR. I tried fixmbr and fixboot but I’m still stuck at the Verifying DMI screen.
Any ideas as to how I can fix my MBR and get back into Windows again? I’m guessing that I some how need to get a virus out but I have no idea what it is.
MBRWork 1.07b
MBRWork is a utility to perform some common and uncommon tasks to the MBR/EMBR/Sectors of a hard drive. It should only be used by power users who understand how computers work. The readme.txt file in the zip contains a list of the tasks available.
Updated 10/05/2002
I’d advice against using such tools unless it’s really needed… and this indeed sounds like a hardware problem, having nothing to do with a virus or MBR.
Try entering the BIOS as your computer starts - usually by pressing the “Delete” key.
Look for an option called S.M.A.R.T and enable it.
Reboot your computer and if you see a message on the screen saying “Replace disk. Imminent failure detected” or similar, your hard drive is nearly or already dead. Hope you backed up!