Antivirus freezing, computer restarting

[Pinetree]

I've got 2 computers, one is a Sony Vaio PCV 7762 and the other is a custom built with a PII CPU, I think it's overclocked.

The Sony was restarting or giving me an error message saying "begining dump of physical memory" whenever I run my virus scan. Have run McAffee, Stinger, and www.trendmicro.com. Out of the three, the McAffee gets the physical memory error, Stinger causes it to restart or get the physical memory error, and Trendmicro just freezes. Ran all of them more than once too.

A week afterwards the computer would turn off right after the power was turned on (checked the forums, and one of the solutions was possible overheating, so the comp was fixed at the local tech store). Took the computer home, ran virus scan, it found a virus and deleted it. Ran virus scan again, and it found the same virus. Disabled the automatic backup (restore point?) in XP in case it was restoring the virus, ran virus scan, the comp gets the "beginning dump of physical memory" error and restarts. Check task manager, and the CPU is running at 100% whenever virus scan is run before the comptuer restarts.

So I think, maybe the CPU is overheating? Then I go into the BIOS to see if I can find out what temp the CPU is running. Find out that the BIOS has no primary hard drive, and is booting up from the slave drive. I don't have a slave drive. So I set the hard drive to primary. Now it gives a error saying "unmountable boot volume" at startup. I go back and try to fix it but can't remember what the original settings were. On the good side, I did learn a lot.

Can I stll save the files from the Vaio hard drive? (without the virus of course ) I would like to pull the hard drive from the Vaio, put it into the custom built, run the AV and back up the files afterwards. And I can't get the case of the Vaio open. There are clips that I can use to remove the top part of the case but I can't remove the side of the case, I don't see any screws to speak of. As for the custom built, I heard that if the motherboard is old, it will partition any hard drive into smaller sections. Is this true? Having something forcibly partitioned doesn't sound too promising for data recovery.

Thanks!

Pinetree

[Dax_Brandy]

yes you can save the files. just properly attached the hardisk as slave to the other PC. scan it and clean all possible infestation.

of course if the motherboard BIOS can not support a large hdd, then that will be a problem and you will need to update your bios version.

good luck!

[Pinetree]

Update the BIOS? But how do I know what to download if I don't know what kind of motherboard it is? Is there some kind of generic update that I should download to do that?

[Dax_Brandy]

that's the first thing you have to look, the motherboard name and model, if you believe that you have an old motherboard.

[Annoymus]

I have the same problem with the "unmountable boot" problem
on the same model I thought the 80 gig hard drive was too good to be true I got suspicious when a friend wanted 100 bucks for it with everything AND a LCD moniter
i dont know if you have them, but run the system recovery discs
if that dosent work you may have to reinstall your operating system