Disk boot failure, insert system disc and press Enter

whowantstwoknow

Hi all,

I believe I may have a virus in the house. First my HTPC acted up yesterday and wouldnt boot up. It doesnt display the above message but cant boot.

This evening, my office PC just got itself tied in a knot, so I hard-powered it off & on. Its now coming up with

"Disk boot failure, insert system disc and press Enter"

I'm either extremely unlucky that both system disks are gone or else some sort of virus has got in. I guess my questions are:

1) how to verify if the system disk are dead or not?
2) if not how to get access to each box and detect the virus/malware? ie USB stick etc
3) is it worthwhile to repair the mbr?

I also have a WHS 2011 server that seems to be working. I've shut it down for now. It has backups of these machines, though I've never followed the procedure to re-establish the image... Could the virus be elsewhere on the LAN (ie router etc?)

Any advice or direction would be much appreciated. I feel alot of late nights ahead of me

Thanks
W.

FSL

I would install a lightweight linux distro such a puppy linux on a bootable USB stick and boot from that.

This will enable you to see if the hard drive is accessible and readable. If it is it could just be the mbr has been corrupted (not necessarily by a virus).

If you use Yumi from pendrivelinux to create your bootable USB stick you can also add a virus scanner to it Kaspersky is the one I use.

whowantstwoknow

Hi,

Created a Kaspersky USB Rescue Disk, on both machines this seems to have repaired the mbr once the full scan was completed. No virus found. A bit freaky it happened to both machine together unless some sort of update caused the problem in the first place?

Thanks for the help

W.