No OS or BIOS

[Alourien]

Hey everyone, I'm a newcomer to Ubuntu and I'm having some problems. I hope you guys can help out.

I was running XP on a computer when it was maliciously infected with viruses. There was no way to clean it without doing a clean install, yet the virus prevented the computer from entering BIOS or anything before actual boot up.

So, I wiped the drive completely clean and placed it in a differnt computer to be formatted. I installed Ubuntu on this drive on the other computer, in hopes of being able to transfer it to the one that was infected.

However, the BIOS still won't boot nor the OS. I've already tried to reset the BIOS and it didn't help.

My computer is a HP Pavilion a1209n with factory hardware.

The motherboard is an Asus P4GV-LA.

What is there, if anything, I can do to get the computer running again? Even just getting the BIOS to work would be good.

[earthpigg]

google gave me this horrifying result:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/bios-virus-rootkit-security-backdoor,7400.html


"You would need to reflash the Bios with a system that you know has not been tampered with," he said. "But if the rootkit is sophisticated enough it may be necessary to physically remove and replace the Bios chip."

i've never had to do anything of the sort, nor have i ever flashed or modified BIOS other than navigating the menus and simple things like that. few non-engineers/developers ever need to, so it's a fairly rare skillset.