Ubcd success
Hello Blade!
I finally have some good news to report. In fact I have GREAT news to report. I successfully created a UBCD Boot CD. After spending a lot of time and a lot of tries, I eventually gave up on using the DELL XP CD as the build source for the boot CD... too many problems in getting that to work. As you suggested, I borrowed a friend's MS XP CD to use as the source and the CD image file was created successfully on my first attempt. I don't know how familiar you are with the UBCD4WIN program but all I can say is "UBCD4WIN ROCKS!"
I can now start the problem machine from the CD and can access MyComputer, get to all the folders and files on the hard drive, with no passwords, and no more Blue Screens. The boot disk also includes a number of Plugins which make available a number of built in tools and utilities like ERUNT, HJT. etc. For the first time in two weeks now, I really feel like we may get this computer cleaned up and running again without formatting the drive and starting from scratch.
I also verified what I think probably caused the problem we had when we tried the ERUNT restore. As I mentioned in a previous post. I did in fact save my original ERUNT registry backup in a subfolder folder named 11_17_09_A, thinking I may want to try another backup later that day and save it in a folder like 11-17_09_B. So when we restored from C:Windows\erdnt\subs and then on the second try C:\Windows\erdnt\hiv-subs, we probably restored something other than my backup. I'm guessing we may have restored an ERUNT sample registry (with an Administrator Password) which normally would have been overwritten by my own backup had I put it in the right folder. Does this make sense?
I am ready to proceed again with your guidance and do look forward to your next reply!
Also, if you wouldn't mind... Can you explain why, when we first started out, we didn't begin by doing a regular Window System Restore to a point prior to the date of infection? I've been wondering about that all along.
Tom