Hard Drive Failure

[fvdave30]

Hi:

I have a computer that started out with a internet antivirus 2011 installation. I worked with the computer to remove it through Super AntiSpyware and through Avast virus software. Now with time the computer has lost icons and now will not start up.

I have removed the hard drives. The secondary data disk is fine and I can read through a usb to ide adapter with no problem. I have a hard time reading the primary hard disk with the same usb to ide adapter and when I get it to read it it will only stay active for reading for about two minutes and then it will quite working altogether.

I am wandering if the hard drive is failing or there is something wrong with it because of the internet antivirus 2011? Has anyone encountered anything like this before?

Thanks for the help.

[Rik from RCE]

You need to get some hard drive diagnostics software from the manufacturer of your hard drive's website and test it out!

[rubberman]

I had to remove this virus from my attorney's system earlier this year. Since I run Linux system software, I mount these Windows drives in an external enclosure or dock, run about 3 different AV scanners over the drive (they all miss something), and clean it up. I also have Linux software to repair the registry on the Windows system drive. I've never been unable to fix a system with this methodology. I find that newer viruses are VERY difficult to remove using Windows tools because once the system is running, the viruses are capable of "hiding" themselves, moving around, etc. I have even seen them infect DLL's on the recovery partition, so if you try to reinstall the OS to factory state, they are still pwnd.

Anyway, to check if your drive is fubar physically, and not just pwnd with a virus, you need to boot up a drive testing stand-alone disc, such as what you can get from Seagate's web site. Since you don't say what make/model of drive you have, I don't know whether that would be best for you, but Seagate's drive diagnostic software will work with non-Seagate drives, although obviously their own hardware will be better analyzed (one would hope).

And in case you are interested in the AV scanning software I use, the scanners are the Linux versions of ClamAV (free, open source), F-Prot, and McAfee. They are all good, but as I said, each finds stuff the others don't.

[fvdave30]

Thank you for all the suggestions from the above replies. I will try them and see what happens.