I came home from out of town last night to my beloved desktop which I missed dearly (not a fan of my laptop). I am running Win7 32bit on that system. I was prompted by Avast to perform a program update, to which I agreed because I had never experienced any troubles doing so before. When it finished, I told it to reboot later because I was in the middle of writing an e-mail. After I had finished what I needed to do, I restarted my system. It was strange, thoug, because I noticed that the system did not actually restart… I saw the logging off & shutting down screen but all my hardware remained on after my monitor faded to black. I decided to force shutdown at that point (after waiting for about 5 min). Upon restart, I got stuck on the Starting Windows screen (waited for b/t 1-2 minutes and decided it was stuck). I forced shutdown again and tried to boot to safe mode. This is when I noted that I was stuck on aswrvrt.sys. After waiting for about 10 min, I forced shutdown again. I double checked BIOS for any potential errors and found nothing. Then I went to the F8 advanced startup menu to try to perform system repair. Incidentally, I found out I don’t have that option listed. Didn’t matter, though, because I had my Win7 installation usb key. I rebooted and booted from said usb key. I tried to go through the automatic repair prompts. They didn’t help, though, as I still could not boot (experiencing the same symptoms as described above). At this point, I did some google searches and happened upon a couple of posts on this forum:
http://195.74.76.34/index.php?topic=144131.0
and http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=135244.0
I managed to figure out how to pull up the cmd via the win7 usb system repair. I was able to run FRST but then following along those threads, I realized I didn’t know what sort of a fix file to use. Nevertheless, I decided to follow the instructions to use the Bootrec /FixBoot & /FixMBR functions. After that, I was able to successfully boot to safe mode (I did not try normal boot just yet). From Safe Mode, I seemingly successfully uninstalled Avast using the uninstall tool. Before allowing restart, I figured I would try to run through FRST & AdwCleaner. I got stuck during the AdwCleaner process on the step where it was scanning my Web Browsers (waited at least half an hour). At that point, I figured I could try the scan again later after rebooting since I had supposed that a normal reboot would work after safe mode worked and uninstalling Avast. I was mistaken because I was met with the same symptom of being stuck on Starting Windows. I then tried, again, to boot to Safe Mode and found myself back to square one — stuck on aswrvrt.sys. I then tried the same process I had previously performed to be able to get into Safe Mode, but it wasn’t working this time. Considering it was past 1:30 AM and I had already worked on it for 3 hours, I decided to give it a rest at that point. This morning, I tried to tackle the problem again, but after running chkdsk /r on the boot drive and still being unable to boot after trying various more suggestions I found off the aforementioned threads, I have decided it would be in my best interest to create my own thread and get some personal help.
So that’s where I’m at… I would greatly appreciate any help from any party to try to get this resolved. I would really like to avoid a reformat because honestly I haven’t backed up in a while due to personal complications in my life… almost died 3 Sundays ago, but that’s beside the point. I look forward to hearing your responses. Thanks.
