2 HDD crashes - or some nasty virus affecting lsass.exe

[onlycw]

How you'll doing?

Both notebooks only boot partially. Under XP, the message is

LSASS.EXE system error, wrong image file format, no initializing... does not begin with MZ

Under Win 7, I was watching a movie with the VLC Player. The movie crashed and there was just a loop of 3-4 seconds of the audio, repeating endlessly. again: "HDD won't initialize"or something similar.

It boots till the Windows squares appear (also in Safe Mode). But then, nothing, nada.

Any ideas? This is the 2nd notebook this happened to in a few days. Am needing this resolved for work...

Thank you in advance for any suggestions!

[Jack Mountain]

Roll back a backup?