start program before explorer

[Wojtek]

So i have this old ibm 560 laptop with windows98 and no floppy/cd.

it got infected with some spyware and now i cannot enter windows.
each time after booting, Explorer.exe has performed an error something and it closes. im then left with my wallpaper and mouse.

i tried safe mode, same thing

tried thousands of selective startup combinations but nothing. Either vfat error or the explorer.exe one.

Id like to at least be able to start ad-aware to scan that computer.
It needs to start before explorer.
googled some things up and it seems i need to modify some reg info for that.
but i cant login to windows to start regedit, and regedit is not available thruh DOS.

Any other way???

 

[WL-Michael]

You may end up having to do things from DOS before your computer even boots into windows, if you know some basic linux commands you'll make it. PM me for more help.

 

[Tree]

If you have your data backed up then you can just format the drive with the bad OS.

The Format Command
Format is a Microsoft DOS command. It's a command line you can run to remove information from a computer disk, floppy disk or hard disk. It is an external command found in many of the Windows Operating systems. Hard drive formatting is done in three steps:

(1) Low-level formatting creates the physical structure on the hard drive. Partitioning divides the hard drive into logical pieces that become volumes. High-level formatting defines the logical structures on the partition and places at the start of the disk any necessary operating system files.

The format command syntax is the following:

FORMAT drive: [/parameters]

- where drive: specifies the volume to format (the hard disk letter followed by a colon) — example format c:
— where [parameters] formats the disk with different options — example format c: /s will copy system files to the formatted disk or format c: /q performs a quick format.

The syntax used between Windows 95, 98 and ME differ slightly from Windows 2000 and XP. To see the available Format command parameters for your operating system, you can type FORMAT /? at the DOS command line.

 

[Wojtek]

meh nothing works on that stupid laptop.
edited system.ini, changed Shell=PathToAdaware
now adawae starts but illegal opperation as well! argh
changed shell to progman.exe, tried to lauch a few things. reinstall adaware, installation goes, program crashes. spybot installation crashes. antivir was not updated for 989 days, returns no infections. scanreg /restore didnt help. scandisk /autofix nothing.

i guess its the end of the laptop.
as i said it does not have any cd-rom or floppy drive. so no means to communicate witht hre outside world. its dead

 

[Mandrake]

No CD-ROM or Floppy? How was Windows even loaded on it in the first place? This isn't one of those mini-laptops like a Toshiba Libretto is it?

 

[Wojtek]

http://cn.ic2.auctions.yahoo.com/users/3/0/1/9/xiaochao0314-img400x350-111389631501.jpg
you have an external floppy drive, wich mine died
and you can use external cd-rom, wich i never had
i had a 2gb pcmcia toshiba hardsisk wich i used to swap files between the computers, but it got stolen when it was in my laptop.

how'd I load windows on it? hum, that was back in 2001. I think i loaded it from another laptop that had an in-built cd-rom and just swapped the drives in the middle of the installation when it restarts after copying the files to the hd.. hehe

 

[WL-Michael]

you have an external floppy drive, wich mine died

Woah, what a hard situation you are in my friend. I guess my above fix wont work without a boot disk to halt the booting process and give you a prompt. Thats what you need to do as all of the other things you did just wasted your time basically, explorer runs those files you edited and if you are trying to halt explorer than what is editing those files doing? Get a usb floppy and run a 98 boot disk from bootdisk.com and do whats in my above post.

See the spyware starts FROM the REGISTRY, so if you can edit the registry and remove all suspicious keys then you'll be fine. Run -> Regedit OR Run -> msconfig