Hi listers!
System details:
MSI Mainboard
Award BIOS
Atlon XP 2000
256 DDR-RAM
Seagate 20 and 40 GB hard drives

My son got a virus this morning (W32/nimda.html).  When he just clicked the
e-mail in Outlook Express 6 to delete it, the computer shut down.  After
re-booting the AV-program was able to delete the actual virus file but it
already had taken over several com and exe files.  To make it short, in the end
he did format the hard disk.  Now we thought everything should be empty and
clean and started installing Win 98 SE from CD but then strange/varying
information about problems started.  Some were solved by partitioning the drive
newly.  But last now is the information that there are problems with the file
USER.EXE right at the beginning of the installation - which of course should be
absolute nonsense as there is no file that could cause problems on the hard
drive after format and partitioning.  Now the guess is that the MBR is defect.
A Google search brought us to try to repair it with the FDISK /MBR command but
this command does not work (program not existing or so!?).  So can anyone out
there give us a helpful idea how to get a healthy MBR again or if the guess is
wrong what else could be done to be able to install Windows again.

hoping for real quick help (happily would like to hear off-list first so we can
try things real quickly)
Heidi Schroeder

                         PCSOFT's List Owner's:
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                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>