[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

More likely it was the begining of your HD Failure that was causing things to blackscreen.

Not sure ow you arrived at that...I might have missed something...

but I thought the last difficulty was that she was not seeing a BIOS screen...which to me would indicate, one of a)keyboard problem b)monitor problem C) motherboard problem

[Gorzaloon]

We have a mutual acquaintance who sent me an SOS, so I went and looked at it. The BIOS comes up briefly a but as soon as the drive runs it jumps to a loading screen, whereupon it stalls with the load progress white bar at the bottom of the screen. The HD was placed into another machine. It runs for a second, but never gets past the boot sector. The BIOS in the good machine will not detect nor auto configure the HD. It's hosed.

All the drive activity of the trojan loader and removal efforts probably ended its miserable life, but it was showing signs of trouble for a long time. Bootups took longer and longer, etc., and files corrupted, but scandisk never found anything wrong when it did run.

People who write trojan loaders, etc do NOT want the machine disabled. They NEED a running machine to sell for their botnets. A broken machine is of no value to them...So I do not regard it as an atack per se.

Anyway, recovering the data from a badly infected drive may not be the best answer anyway. It's like digging up the corpse of a plague victim.