gateway pc wont start....

hiya guys..yourv helped me no end before and im hoping you can once again...bear with me...ive got a short story to tell...

my son has a gateway desktop pc and is running on win me.

he recently had a virus and deleted files whith gay abandon tring to get the pesky thing..he has no idea what he has deleted though.

now when we turn his pc on we get the gateway logo and a progress bar that goes about halfway then stops!!

we cant get windows to run
the pc wont boot from floppy
we cant use his recovery cd
we cant get into safe mode
we get change any settings to enable him to boot from floppy
we cant access setup

in fact we just have a big lump with a gateway logo smiling at us...


am i missing something? we need to format disc and do a clean install...if we can get to a command prompt i can do the rest.

any ideas guys

any help appreciated

many thanks

dave uk

 

Well, this is probably no big deal, so long as there are not of irreplaceable files on the computer. One scenario is that you start up the computer in the safe mode* and go in and save a handful of documents on floppy (like homework) and then just insert gateways installation disk and restart the computer. At that point you can restore to how it was set up originally.

Alternatively, they have a "live update" feature. If the restore disk lets you run live update, it will scan to see what components are installed, and better still, which components have been updated since your restore disk was issued.

If, perish the thought, you do not have the restore disk, you have but to find your computers serial number on the computer, or find it some other way like their help line, and then order the disk to be sent to you.

Its quite easy! i did it for someone yesterday and restoring the computer took less than an hour. the subsequent installations from windows update page took much longer on his 56k connection

*To start up in safe mode keep tapping the f-8 key during rebooting. This will bring up the startup menu and you choose safe mode from the short list of possibilities
-HandsOff