I am running a machine with XP Home on it. Yesterday, we got a message lsass.exe and the computer restarts over and over when the message is taken off. I think we may have the sasser worm. I tried to reformat the harddrive but the machine doesn`t respond to booting from the XP disk even when I change in the bios. Is this a situation where we will have to change the harddrive or is there another way around this? Thanks.

What is the make and model of the computer?

Are you certain the CD drive is set to boot prior to the hard drive?

Are you using a Microsoft XP CD or an OEM Recovery disk?

This is a homebuild. The cd is set to boot first before the harddrive. I checked it in the bios prior to trying. This is the Xp install Cd. I have no recovery disk. Thanks.

How many HDD's/CD's do you have in the system?

If you're using IDE HDD's, and have a spare/backup, you could always put the existing master on the secondary IDE with another master on the primary and format it that way; you should also be able to install Windows straight onto the HDD in the secondary IDE...

Originally Posted by Linhans

This is a homebuild. The cd is set to boot first before the harddrive. I checked it in the bios prior to trying. This is the Xp install Cd. I have no recovery disk. Thanks.

Do you not get the message: "Press any key to boot from CD"?

Thank You palmeraf_75 and jephree. I may try your suggestion palmeraf_75. I`ll have my boyfriend look at it as he built it. I do get the message press any key to boot from CD. I do that and it just keeps loading and I get the message again. lsass.exe error. We have 3 hdds and 2 opticals. I think we have enough to try another hdd. I think, to be safe, that we may have to take out the affected hdd and use one of the others to put the OS on. I was just hoping that we could avoid it. We use the third hdd to put our restore on. Thanks again.

You can get the utility from your hard drive manufacturer to "wipe" the hard drive.

The issue of a "boot virus" is that the boot sector is infected and thus the drive needs to be totally "wiped" not just formatted.

The manufacturer of your hard drive should have such a tool on its web site.

Thanks for all the help. If we could use the opticals or anything else on the machine, we could use a wipe utility. Unfortunately, our keyboard doesn`t work on the machine either. We tried it on our other machine and it works fine. It seems to be frozen just before full bootup. I can use the keyboard when I go into the bios but that is it. I think we may as well take out the infected hdd and put in another. I`ll try to clean it up externally and use it as an external storage source. Thanks anyway.

The hard drive tools would be Bootable tools and if you can navigate the BIOS you should have no problem there either.

I moved the problem machine to another location and connected keyboard and mouse with ps2. Works now. Even boots from the xp inst. disk. Will try to correct with xp disk. If not, will probably take out drive and wipe and reinstall. Not sure at this point. Thanks for help.