Crazy Startup

[SARGE]

One of the boy's pc's started something screwy today. When booting up the autoexec screen comes on as usual, but there's a sudden entry with a bunch of crazy symbols, including a few smiley faces. It then says "bad command name", shows a few command prompts, then boots to desktop. I used msconfig, selected the autoexec.bat tab and unchecked the box with all the symbols. I noticed upon boot up there was an entry after the symbols, next to another c: prompt - something about rem TShoot; this particular line isn't in the autoexec.

Ideas?

[Iman74]

Copy and paste the autoexec.bat so we can see. Also anything with REM in front of it, you don't need to worry about it. the command "rem" prevents that line from being executed.

[SARGE]

OK. The rem TShoot is gone now??

[SARGE]

here's a shot from msconfig:

[galaxian]

You just have a mangled autoexec.bat file. If you have a backup, restore it. If you don't run anything from the DOS level, there should be nothing to worry about. Rename or delete the file and forget about it.

[SARGE]

Thanks. I deleted the whole thing and it recreated itself properly upon reboot.

[galaxian]

"It recreated itself"???

Autoexec files do not "recreate" themselves.

If you deleted/renamed the file, rebooted and you now have an autoexec.bat file, warm up your virus scanner, update the defs and do a full av scan.

[SARGE]

I deleted it and now the usual 2 entries are the only items. I read somewhere on these forums (I'll find it) where it would recreate if needed. Here's the shot now:

[SARGE]

Originally posted by galaxian "It recreated itself"??? Autoexec files do not "recreate" themselves. If you deleted/renamed the file, rebooted and you now have an autoexec.bat file, warm up your virus scanner, update the defs and do a full av scan.

Maybe a poor choice of words on my part.

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...light=recreate

***notice glc's entry

[Cricket]

Hey SARGE,

What the heck was that? Did your son download and install something off the net?
I saw those same kind of weird symbols in the first boot screen during drive detection once. They were for my CD-ROM when I had the jumper set wrong .

Cricket