I have been trying to get rid of a virus on the laptop all day, basically its stopped all my virus software, system restore etc from working, tried malware bytes, superantispyware, a squared and numerous others, i have no windows disk as its at work to format the c drive, any help would be much appreciated i am pulling my hair out- well what i have left

try the castlecops forum, download hijackthis and post a scan on the forum

hth

As 59, and be totally honest with your dealings with CastleCops, don't miss anything out at all, however insignificant it may seem to be.

Probably not the same, I had one a while back booted itself up then installed a fake anti-virus program over the system?

I re-named it's exe. file to stop the auto boot up then deleted it.

(Assuming you've also tried running an uptodate anti-virus scan in safe mode)

Sometimes the more persistant virus infestations need to be removed by use of a boot disk which runs some anti virus software upon startup.

Have a trawl round the big anti virus sites & see if they have one.
I'va also come accross a virus some time back that seemed to somehow 'know' about the software the big mainsstream venndors use & had to use one not normally on the radar – Clamwin

On that particular occasion it was a happy ending.

Good luck !
Chris

Most of the sucesful viruses install a copy of themselves in your recovery partition. The recovery partition is protected from deletion so when your anti virus programs run, they can't delete the original and so on next boot up, you're infected again.

Try running the AV pograms in single user mode (hit F7 when prompted at boot up and then drop into safe mode), see if that helps. If not you can unprotect your recovery sector…

right click your 'my computer' icon, select properties, click the system restore tab, select the 'turn off system restore' tick box.
reboot, run your av stuff.

Castlecops has ceased operations![Either that or they have got a virus]

(I know nowt about viruses, as may become clear: )

could you attach the drive to another computer WITHOUT INFECTING THE OTHER ONE, then copy off what you need onto a pendrive/CD rom/other spare disc or something & scrub your original & start again ?

[edit: oooh, oooh – doesn't somebody do an online tool – housecall or something ?]

Update- I have now formatted the drive after spending hours and hours, got off what i wanted onto external hardrive, probably for the best now, only thing is the bloody disc I got with the pc is at work, so I need the drivers