Laptop won't boot after avast found a rootkit

Avast Free Antivirus / Premium Security
1

Hey,

I installed avast on another laptop with windows 7 after having problems that I assumed were a virus, and avast found a rootkit. Chose to get rid of it and Avast needed to restart the laptop

Laptop restarted and the screen just went black, computer’s on, just not doing anything. Left it for about an hour and a half thinking maybe it was just working in the background and needed some time, but it just stayed black.

Forced a shutdown with the power button and started it up again, the only thing that pops up is the option to pause a boot by hitting esc. have about three seconds to do that. Tried it and was given bios options and all that, plus recovery.

Tried recovery option and it went back to the black screen.

Anyone have any ideas of what I can do? Don’t have a recovery disk.

Thanks

2

Hi MikeD 156 And Welcome to the Forum?

Does it boot in Safe Mode?

3

Hi Mike

Please try to open the task manager by pressing three keys on your keyboard Ctrl+Shift+Esc.(or Ctrl+Atl+Delete).

On the task manager you can find file tab → click and go for new task → then type explorer.exe → click on ok.

After that you can view the desktop icon

then check the avast status and let us know.

4

Can you boot in Safe Mode (hit F8 while booting)?

5

No, won’t boot in safe mode. I’ve made a recovery cd on another computer and currently trying that, however startup repair didn’t work, trying system restore

6

I’m in the same boat, Avast found a virus (I think it was a rootkit) and I sent it to the chest. I scheduled a startup scan but got tired of waiting and hit esc. When windoze tried to boot it sent me to a screen with the options launch startup repair or start windows normally. I choose start windows normally and the windows logo appeared but after that it blackscreened and quickly rebooted. I tried choosing startup repair but that gives the error 0xc0000225 the boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible. After I ran FixMbr and FixBoot I’m still having the same problem, any advice? I’m considering just reinstalling.

7

@ElighCS,
Your problem is NOT the same as the one in this topic.

@MikeD156,

If you can’t boot into Windows Safe Mode either, then this is probably not related to Avast itself, but just a coincidence that you were dealing with something related to Avast.

Can you at least get into the BIOS and actually see the screen?