Help! AVG has completely wiped our home PC?

Question

So I installed the free version, it found 54 trojans/spyware/adware etc, and appeared to have either healed, or moved them to the virus vault.

Needed to shut down and re-boot to complete the process, and now I go to log on and there's nothing - just a blank blue screen...it's like EVERYTHING has been wiped. This happened to anyone else, and do you know if there's anything I can do to restore it? Feel very guilty as it's my bf's PC....

Answer 1

Never heard of AVG doing that before - this sounds more like a hardware failure.

Try starting the PC and when it starts up - listen to the beeps it makes - ONE BEEP denotes all is OK.

Repeating beeps indicate the fault - you will need to look up what the beeps mean - i.e. one beep indicates ALL OK. Two beeps may indicate a failure of Power supply - three beeps may indicate motherboard failure etc etc.

The beeps tell you what is wrong or where to start looking.

Go onto GOOGLE and type in - PC start up beeps - or similar - you'll find loads of info on the signals given by your PC

Answer 2

insert the recovery disks and do a follow the prompts for recovery NOT format.

You will need to boot from the cd  

Answer 3

Insert your recovery disc follow the prompts. Do not reformat. Then download & update http://www.superantispyware.com run a full scan follow the instructions. Then download http://www.besttechie.net/tools/mbam-set... update & run a full scan & follow the instructions on both to their conclusion. This should solve your problem

Answer 4

Have you already done a repair? Its probably not necessary. It sounds like you had a vundo/virtumundo or other smitfraud infection, it infects explorer.exe and often when cleaned will wipe the desktop.

To fix explorer do the following:

bring up task manager (ctrl+alt+del) file > new task> type in: regedit. Navigate to the following:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Software

Microsoft

Windows NT

Current Version

Winlogon

in the right pane double click on 'shell' replace the contents with explorer.exe (even if it already says explorer.exe replace it anyway) then reboot

Answer 5

AVG will not wipe the machine, but serious infections (the machine can not have been previously protected) can make it impossible to clean up without affecting the system. The trick now is to boot from the original system cd, and choose the R repair option. This will replace the damaged files and get it running. After this it will need to repeat the updates, but do one more manual scan with AVG before seriously using the machine. This is NOT a motherboard failure, people who play guessing games should stick to answering questions on cookery.

Answer 6

OH NO! A blue screen??? That means the motherboard has failed and needs to be replaced. Thats sucks! All of the information stored on his computer is lost.

Answer 7

If you are running Windows XP, then when you turn the computer on again, go to safemode, and then login as Administrator, from there.. do a system restore.

That should work, and restore the computer to an earlier date.

If it does not work, you will have to enter the reinstall disks, and looks like reinstalling Windows Again! :(

Answer 8

colinc is right