Computer Not Booting

[tshall]

I got a call from my daughter who hooked up a Lexmark Z51 printer to her computer. After installing software and hooking up the printer utilizing usb1 it didn't want to recognize the printer. She called me and I said maybe she should uninstall, which she did. A message came up saying system found new hardware, but it was the modem, which was already there. She cancelled that and installed Lexmark software again anyway, then rebooted. This time when it rebooted she had no modem. At this point she did a restore and the modem came back and everything seemed to be fine. She then reinstalled the printer software and shut down. When the system rebooted she got a black screen with the cursor on the left side blinking. She shut the system down and it went thru scandisk and she was able to get into safe mode. She then restored to an earlier date but the same black screen came up again. She then inserted her startup disk and did a scanreg/restore from dos, same black screen. She can started up in safe mode, and seems to be able to do a restore, but that doesn't solve the problem. We would appreciate any suggestions. She's running ME.

[MADMAC`]

K it sounds as if one of the startup files has become corrupted, Funny ithought system restore was supposed to repair that!!! the first thing I would do is boot up and get to the startup menu again,this time choose the option to bootlog, that will give you the file/program that is failing to load. if you post the result here I will see if there is a quick fix to get you running again. use the startup disk start up with CDrom support, and over install windows.

[tshall]

Thanks for the reply madmac. I had to wait until this weekend to drive over there, about 2 1/2 hours one way. It turned out to be a virus, the printer installation was just a coincidental thing. I couldn't figure out why we couldn't resolve the problem by restoring. She apparently got the virus while in the midst of installing the printer so naturally attibuted it to that. All is well now and thanks again for the reply.