Thinkpads Forum

I installed McAfee antivirsu 7.0 on a 600x, 26454eu, 500 PII, 256 ram, and during bootup, after the windows 98 screen appears, nothing happens, the HD light even stops. If I press escape, I see a dos screen, indicating McAfee is checking for viruses .. at that point, nothing happens, and the HD light once again stops, and system is frozen.

I tried to goto Safe mode, but by pressing f8, system beeps alot, and I get a keyboard error. I do not have recovery software, otherwise I would just erase the whole hd (nothing on my pc that isnt already backed up).

I guess if I can somehow get into dos or the bios, CAN I remove McAfee from the boot process ? that may work .. and allow me to get to windows, remove the mcAfee software all together ..

If you can create a Windows 98 boot disk (go to www.bootdisk.com for a disk image) and boot into DOS from that, you should be able to edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat files on the root of the C: drive and have it set up to not run McAffee at boot.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:If you can create a Windows 98 boot disk (go to www.bootdisk.com for a disk image) and boot into DOS from that, you should be able to edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat files on the root of the C: drive and have it set up to not run McAffee at boot.

should have mentioned, no floppy drive, only CD .. I dont think that website can help me with making a bootable cd ?

Do you have a high speed connection?

If so, you can try this:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

It is about 75MB, but it has sooo many useful tools, and it is bootable.

Well, actually, if you press the key needed in bootup for the menu which I believe is F8 at Windows startup then when you get the menu select command prompt only, you can edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys from there.

At the command prompt, type:

"cd c:\windows\commant"

then

"edit c:\autoexec.bat"

then remove anything McAffee related then hit "Alt + F" and select "Exit" and choose yes when you are asked to save.

Now type"
"edit c:\config.sys"
and remove anything McAffee related then save and exit.

Now you should be able to reboot your computer and hopefully be good to go.

Thanks guys for all the help .. I was able to get into the Safe mode and remove McAfee ..

Also dloading the boot cd ..

any ideas why McAfee software did this ? not compatible ? bad update of virus defs ?

You have to be careful with virus scanners, especially on older computers, they can really induce penalty on system performance.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:You have to be careful with virus scanners, especially on older computers, they can really induce penalty on system performance.

would you recommend an older version of Norton ? and prevent it from scanning at bootup ? is that possible ?

I actually wouldn't know what to reccomend on an older computer as I don't have a virus program on my laptop since I rarely download stuff onto it but my desktop computer has the free version of AVG by Grisoft. They actually hold up their claim of not slowing your system down, unless of course you're using something really vintage like an original Pentium.

http://free.grisoft.com/doc/2/lng/us/tpl/v5