Plea for help...Boot sector virus

[Prodigal]

Please can anyone help me out, I got a PC, that the previous owner infected with a trojan that kicked off 2 days after he left the country...Long story...Anyway I'm in a position where:

Boot disks, (tried XP & Win2K) fail, as I get a blue screen boot sector stop while trying to install.

Hiren boot cd can detect no HD, (I've tried 3 different HD's...) They're fine in Bios.

Removed the HD battery to reset everything, same problems as above.

All the microsoft web suggests is antivirus s/w, which isn't any good that I can see, because as far as the PC's concerned I have no HD.

Any advice, excluding "get a hammer, a small blowtorch, some mentos & a bottle of coke..." (as I'm getting close to trying this myself), would be really appreciated.

[LeftEyeNine]

Prodigal,

Get an antivirus software that creates boot disks for such severe infections. I'm not sure which ones do that but the major ones should be able to. Get these copies on a clean machine with a similar OS to yours, of course.

Then try booting your machine with those bootable anti virus disks, I did not experience it myself but those emergency boot disks are created for such situations.

Good luck.

[Prodigal]

Thanks LeftEy' I'll give it a try.

[LeftEyeNine]

Oh and thread moved to Hard- Software Section. There is the real geek cave, hence the issue can attract more alternatives of solution. ~:)

[_Martyr_]

Try using a LiveCD OS such as knoppix.

[tibilicus]

God knows how there was a boot sector virus on it. Those nasties are very rare these days..