>i have been hit by a boot virus. I ran the antivirus and the virus was removed, but now, i cannot acces my cd it doesn't exist. Furthermore, i have some warnings on my ide standard and primary controler, i have no cd controler. I tried reinstalling, removing all the controllers and letting windows do the job, low level formating and reinstalling windows, none of the above worked, i still have the same headache. The strange thing is that in the errorproof mode (don't know the english translation but is pretty clos ain't it?) it works, i do not have the problems, what is happenning, what should i do? where should i go ( and tomorrow won't be another day) please help!

You mention that it works in Safe Mode, which is surprising. The first thing to do is to take stock of your environment and figure out what drivers are needed to make things work.

First, what type of CD-ROM drive is it? Is it attaced to the system through the Primary or Secondary IDE controller, or does it have its own controller card?

Second, what drivers were in place before when things worked properly? Were the real mode drivers being loaded (a DEVICE= statement related to the CD-ROM drive in the CONFIG.SYS, and an invocation of MSCDEX in the AUTOEXEC.BAT would indicate that real-mode drivers rather than Win9x native protected mode drivers were used to access the CD-ROM drive.)

If the real-mode drivers were being used before, I'd continue to use them, and reinstall Windows from scratch. I'd go as far as to re-FDISK and FORMAT, and reinstall all the applications after the reinstall if I had confidence that I had everything backed up to a reliable backup medium and that I could successfully read the backup.

If no real-mode drivers were being used before, I'd boot up with a DOS disk that had the real-mode drivers in place, and copy the Win9x install image to a directory on my hard drive. I'd then boot to a command prompt and run the install from the copy of the Win9x I'd put on the hard drive. This has the advantage of not having any real-mode drivers running while the install takes place, which should make it easier for Win9x to identify the hardware and use native protected mode drivers.