Virus ridden computer freezes on startup - can't access safe mode

Posted by Eric on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Eric
Published on 2010-01-27T07:50:08Z Indexed on 2010/03/15 9:20 UTC
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Someone whom I love but who cannot be trusted with a live internet connection downloaded a particularly nasty virus that in turn downloaded a variety of unknown other viruses onto my home computer. The computer now freezes completely a few seconds after reaching the desktop and is unresponsive to any keyboard or mouse command.

There are videos of my little kid on this hard drive that are not backed up and that I cannot bear to lose. But if I could get in there long enough to copy them off to an external drive I would have no problem doing a clean windows install to fix the problem; everything else is backed up online but the videos were too large.

Normally I would start by going into safe mode but I have a large Dell monitor that doesn't show anything until the welcome screen appears. I think that I have gotten into the setup screen once or twice by mashing keys before I can see anything, but this monitor doesn't support that so I can't see what I'm doing to get it to boot from CD or anything else.

I'm at my wits end. Any advice?

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