Acronis Loader wird gestartet...

In an attempt to overcome a problem with an external hard drive a friend loaded ADD onto my laptop. The programme turned out to be in German so we didn't attempt to use it.
Problem now when I try to boot up the computer frreezes and I get the message - Acronis Loader wird gestartet...

flashed up repeatedly until the processor overheats and the machine shuts down.

Pressing cntl alt delete or F2 gets me as far as the pre-boot screen but nothing there works and it jumps back to the German message...

HELP... or should that be 'Hilfe' !

The laptop is a Toshiba running Windows XP.
Is there any way I can by-pass this programe, get into windows and delete the thing..?

 

I've managed to get the c prompt by putting in the recovery cd and choosing exit instead of reformatting the hard drive.

From the c prompt all I can access is the RAM containing DOS - it tells me that there's no X drive - which I assume is the hard drive.

It seems the hard drive has become inaccessible - very suspicious given that the same problem occurred earlier yesterday with my external hard drive - the reason I was playing around with software to rescue the data on the drive.

Does that sound like a virus or someone hacking my system?

Shouldn't be either as I only installed Norton 360 a few days back. Or is that not worth what I paid for it?

 

If you're getting an Acronis message at boot-up, it's not a virus. Normally, OSS is not installed automatically when DD is installed. However, some have reported that it is. I'm assuming DD was installed in Windows, however, you may have just installed OSS from the CD?

Can you boot into the XP Recovery Console from either an XP CD or the recovery partition / recovery option on your computer? If so, running the following commands should remove OSS from the booting process (<ENTER> means to press the ENTER key):

Code:

fixmbr <ENTER>
fixboot <ENTER>

These will restore the MBR code and the boot sector code back to the XP defaults.

OSS should not cause your computer to overheat. It may lockup, reboot, etc., but it shouldn't overheat unless the computer already has problems in that area.

If you get booted back into Windows and DD/OSS was installed in Windows, uninstall them. Otherwise, you may end up with the same error again.