help with mate's pc

A friend of mine has his pc family's pc infected with a virus, which causes it to start up sluggishly, and BSoDs five minutes later, which is too fast to do anything, I can't even run the copy of ClamAV I have on my USB drive.

So we asked some computer technicians around whether they know what to do, and the answer we got was that they will reformat the hard disk. This is a bit of a problem since he has some important files in it.

So, he asked me whether I can help him.

My main idea is that I boot from a CD, copy the files from the C:\ partiton to the D:\ partition, and then reformat the C:\ partition since a good number of system files are missing.

In case it helps, when the computer crashes, it mentions a problem with a file called win32k.sv , and the files RVHOST.exe, and svchost.dll.

RVHOST.exe is definitely a virus but i dont think it cause the BSOD. Might be overheat or faulty driver (if you can supply the exact BSOD error, it might help).

If you want to reformat the PC, then yes, you can backup the data first by booting to any life CD or slave the HD to other PC.

Have you tried booting in safe mode and running anti virus there?

ps: a system restore might also help

Try a system restore, otherwise try to repair or reinstall Windows.

PS. RVHOST is bad. More information about it can be found here: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/startups/RVHOST.exe-16592.html

i did try booting into safe mode first, but it couldn't even change to safe mode.

And it was too slow to even run system restore, since the computer crashes after 5 minutes windows starts up.

And I couldn't even repair Windows from the CD, for that matter.

The technicians said that the virus is probably deleting Windows files one by one, making it useless overtime. (as if it's not useless anyway :P )

So I'll probably retrieve the files and then reinstall Windows.

i'm not to sure about this but couldn't you use ths taskmanager and end whatever process it is thats doing this.

but if you have five minuts just transfer the files to a flash drive

Don't bother trying to get winblowz back up, just use a Linux LiveCD (depends if partition is NTFS on choice) such as Knoppix, save the important data, reformat and clean install!

Check google for, more than likely Linux +NTFS+ data recovery.

Good luck and this is why backups are a good standard of practice!

I would suggest a software that resizes your hardrive partition and install a fresh installation of windows. When you finish installing it. Your partition from the infected windows partition should be visible on your new parition. You can then maybe access the important files but besides that i think just install a fresh installation.

I would suggest a software that resizes your hardrive partition and install a fresh installation of windows. When you finish installing it. Your partition from the infected windows partition should be visible on your new parition. You can then maybe access the important files but besides that i think just install a fresh installation.