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Ben, how old is the drive? It's possible the drive just died, and it's merely a coincidence.
Go to the drive manufacturer's website and download their diag program and make a floppy. Boot to the floppy, and run diags on the drive.
There are a number of hard drive nuking programs available that will write ones and zeros to the entire drive, making it squeaky clean. The only thing I wouldn't do is a low level format.
AeroPA;
Three years ago this six year old Gateway was infected, pulled all the files and had a high security puter friend bring it back to zero memory, all is good.
I see once in a while puters placed by the curb side "free" man you can pull a lot of personal information from them, people should be careful.
I hear that. I downloaded a few freebie nuking programs just to try them out. They say they'll clean them to DOD standards. Most of them recommend at least 3 complete passes for good enough, up to 8 for well done.
My wife is an IT Tech and she yes, some viruses can destroy hard drives. Says she sees it at work all the time with people that just surf the net all day.
Sounds like a 50/50 chance, if it takes your good if not recycle time.
I see towers at the curb side "free" once in a while, them worth dragging home to pay with? Pack rat that can't help thenselves.
.....=o&o>.....
There are also viruses that can write themselves into the bios memory on your mainboard, thus travelling from one new HDD to the next...
Cross your fingers, fasten your seatbelt, and try fdisk/reformat/reload.
If the first thing after the operating system you load is an anti-virus, and it calls "Cannot install - virus present" you'll know you have a trashed MB.
Last edited by Greywolf; Sep 16, 2006 at 08:20 PM.
I want to thank all of you for the posts.
Since all of this stuff is way over my head, I decided to let a friend check it out for me, instead of me doing my rendition of Cream's Toad on it.