Here is the situation so at my friends house the other day we got board and felt like fixing their main computer which his brothers destroyed. We installed AVG virus scanner and scanned away. After it went 25% through the temp folder we just went and deleated all the contents in the folder because they were almost all viruses. then we rescanned every thing and it detected over 1100 threats. After healing every thing and restarting the computer it refuses to reboot. In safe mode and normally mode it goes to the log in screen we just hit ok (no password) and it shows the welcome screen plays the little jingle and returns to the login screen. Now all we wanna do is get into the computer and copy all his pictures and documents onto a CD or external hard drive then we will format it. We thought we would try dos and just mess with commands (cause i know nothing about dos) but we get errors and cannot boot into dos. its OS is MS2k (2000) so there isn't a system restore or any thing. Is there any other way to back up the files we need so we can format it. I think im gonna try and install Windows XP onto my external, boot from that and just get the files we need. If you have any ideas please suggest them. Thanks for your patients in reading my oh so long story.

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Next time you might want to try Avast - it will remove all of the viruses before Windows has started fully and requires no boot disks to do this. I've always found that AVG dosen't detect as many viruses as Avast does.

The best thing to do would be to put the hard drive into another computer. You might even be able to fit it into your current external hard disk caddy, as long as it isn't sealed or screwed [most just clip together].
Then boot up the computer using the main hard drive, and access the drive as a secondary hard drive from Windows and copy the stuff you need.

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Much agreed. Removing the Hard Drive (HDD) from the crashed computer and setting it up as an external is the preferred way -- this way, you reduce you risk of further corrupting the data you need to extract.

This is the method I most commonly (but not always) use for data extractions, on a daily basis.

1. Remove the HDD from the crashed computer
2. If you have an external drive caddy (usually USB), install it in that and set the jumper pin to Master.
3. On the host computer (the computer that will be reading the external HDD), install Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware and update the definitions BEFORE connecting the external HDD
4. Connect the external HDD
5. Open the drive from My Computer and begin copy/paste functions of all the data you want to save, to a new folder
6. Burn the data from the folder to a CD
7. Verify the CD contents
8. Reformat the external HDD

If possible, after all data has been extracted, use a software program such as WipeDrive Pro to destroy all contents from the drive that has been infected. This will insure the destruction of all data, including virus'.