Got nasty virus/malware/Trojan last week that I was able to remove using various tools. The problem now is that the system hangs when choosing the user. Can start up the laptop on safe mode, however. Safe mode with network doesn't work.

This was a two year old laptop so it was time to buy a new one. The problem is that the old one doesn't recognize external hard drives etc so moving the data is problematic. The DVD/CD does work but cannot burn. I have no idea at this point where the original windows XP pro disk is.

I have been thinking of maybe removing the internal drive and putting it into an external enclosure.

Any better ideas?