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Ok, I really need some help. I was trying to get rid of some pr0n adware with AdAware and it asked if it could run on startup because it couldn't end a certain process. On startup, I could boot to the login screen (sorry, this is XP Pro BTW) but after logging in the computer would hang on the background. I think explorer.exe was having trouble starting up because eventually it would go to the normal screen but there wouldn't be a toolbar to use. System restore refused to run under any conditions. I did a lot of stuff to play around with it until I stumbled on a fabulously moronic solution: why don't we enable normal startup! I didn't realize until it was too late that this was enabling every piece of spyware and process that I'd disabled since getting the computer a coule years ago. So for all practical purposes my OS is dead and the hard drive needs to be reformatted. This is not my problem though.
The main problem is how do I get data off that hard drive before reformatting? Only the OS is screwed up and I have a LOT of savegame data, music, and documents I need moved off. A couple of solutions I've been tossing around on hearsay are:
1) Reinstall XP. Can someone who has done this tell me if it could fix my problem and whether it would clear out my documents or anything like that?
2) Toss the hard drive into another computer. I have an old throwaway computer with 98SE on it but my HD is in NTFS. Conceivably this could be upgraded to 2000 briefly for the purposes of accessing it. Alternately, I could put it in my parent's new Dell. My big worry is: will the computer boot up the normal OS on startup, and will whatever spyware is on my bad hard drive spread to the new one? If so, is there someway to temporarily castrate the old one so I can copy the needed data to a different computer for burning?
If anyone has any other ideas in addition to these, please post! Thanks in advance.
The main problem is how do I get data off that hard drive before reformatting? Only the OS is screwed up and I have a LOT of savegame data, music, and documents I need moved off. A couple of solutions I've been tossing around on hearsay are:
1) Reinstall XP. Can someone who has done this tell me if it could fix my problem and whether it would clear out my documents or anything like that?
2) Toss the hard drive into another computer. I have an old throwaway computer with 98SE on it but my HD is in NTFS. Conceivably this could be upgraded to 2000 briefly for the purposes of accessing it. Alternately, I could put it in my parent's new Dell. My big worry is: will the computer boot up the normal OS on startup, and will whatever spyware is on my bad hard drive spread to the new one? If so, is there someway to temporarily castrate the old one so I can copy the needed data to a different computer for burning?
If anyone has any other ideas in addition to these, please post! Thanks in advance.
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