System Halted. Virus may me responsible

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Hello,

I'm trying to fix my dad's old computer. I know this may seem futile and that the computer in question is beyond outdated, but we can't afford to buy a new one, so please help.

The Computer in question is an old VPR Matrix 1620, 1.67Ghz Pentium 4, 768MB RAM, and originally, it had a 60 GB Hard drive, running Windows XP Home. After several years of good use and virus attacks that I have thwarted, one apparently got away and crashed the original hard drive, beyond repair. I mean it PHYSICALLY damaged the hard drive.

After hearing this, I gave my dad his options when he returned with the "System Halted" error and a hard drive that made loud "ca-chunk" noises when trying to boot up. He shut down the system until he had a new hard drive to re-install the operating system on. The new hard drive was a Western Digital 160 GB (127GB in FAT32) Caviar Blue drive. After I had installed windows and made all the necessary updates, a day later, the same "System Halted" error came up when I rebooted after the system was frozen. I rebooted again, this time with the Win XP CD in the drive, booted from the CD, and thereby copying the necessary system files back into the computer, and it ran fine. Then a day or 2 later, the system froze, I rebooted, and the "System Halted" error came back up.

This virus may also have affected the flash drive or external drive I connected to it when I reinstalled the OS and configured a backup system.

Please help! I think this may be a memory-resident virus, or something stuck in the motherboard, processor, or BIOS. I need a way to fix this. My AVG and Malwarebytes scans have come up inconclusive, no virus. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Where can I possibly download a tool to scan for and remove this painful infection and get my dad back online. PLEASE RESPOND ASAP.

Thank You
 
cmscalvert, you have 2 threads asking us for urgent help but you have not given us anything to work with.

Please follow the steps HERE. When you have finished, attach the 3 logs for review.

Be sure to check the lines in Malwarebytes and Superantispyware to remove the entries they find. I will instruct you on the HijackThis log

Please understand that this forum if for virus and malware removal..IF the problem is not from that, I will refer you to one of our other forums for help.
 
Regarding the reply I left here: https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic141189.html#post840740

If you have your dad run Malwarebytes and HijackThis, will you be able to get the full logs here?

Right now, we have nothing to work with except this:

Definition of: System Halted

A DOS error message that means the computer could not continue due to a hardware or software problem. It can occur if a memory parity error is detected or if a peripheral board goes awry. A program bug can also cause this as well as a virus.

Testing memory, testing for viruses and removing peripheral boards one at a time are ways to isolate the problem.
 
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