I'm trying to help a friend whose system was hijacked - he believed them when they said they were from MS tech support.
I've already run Norton's Boot Recovery Tool & Kaspersky Rescue Disk tools to no avail. Kasperksy File Manager showed there is a recovery partition on the hard drive if I can get at it. I've built a Windows 8.1 installation DVD in the hopes that will get me to the recovery options.
I'm wondering if maybe there's a way to simply recover the boot menu & F8 without having to go the whole recovery route. Is there?
Thanks for the reply. I'd already done a bunch of Google on randomware but was not familiar with majorgeeks. Am I missing something or does it have a search ability somewhere I've not yet found?
I was able to get part of the way back by booting to downloaded installation media and performing a system recovery. The system was stuck in Safe Mode, though. It also reported no Internet access even though it was available. Windows updates would run only to be removed because the couldn't be installed.
I poked at that issue for some time before running a Refresh. Fortunately the activation status was not corrupted so no license key was required. [That was good news because my friend couldn't find it and it wasn't on his two year-old Dell box.]
I was able to get a list of his installed programs using a Powershell command so he's now got a list of instructions. I'll give him is system back once he's learned how to do backups!