XP sp2 will not boot on Asus motherboard, smiley face..

[pirateclem]

My asus/intel based PC has decided to not boot. Odd thing is that after going through bootstrap the screen just goes black and there is a small ASCII smiley face at the bottom of the screen and some dashes at the bottom that stream accross. Sounds like either a virus or hardware but I really think hardware not coming up. Perhaps the SATA bus. Don't know. Any input?

ASUS P2BDeluxe (If I remember correctly)
Seagate SATA drive
Intel 2.66 GHz hyperthreaded

XP sp2, and I downloaded a windows update before rebooting.....hmm....not sure why one windows update would freak out the whole system, I think it's a coincidence.

Input?

 

[Nelviticus]

That sounds very much like a boot sector virus. I'm not sure how you'd get rid of it though - if you don't get a response here, try asking how to get rid of a boot sector virus on the XP forum.

Regards

Nelviticus