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virus found, hard drive ...dead?

Forum Storage : General Storage - virus found, hard drive ...dead?

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Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

I have a Western Digital 13gb hard drive with important tax and
financial information on it. Unfortunately, I got a virus on this
drive, and when the
virus was removed, the drive stopped working. Its recognized on boot
and in
bios, but when the machine boots, it wont begin. I tried slaving it,
and
scandisk pops up, but isn't able to access the disk. It just hangs at
scandisk
until I hit the power stud.

When kind of virus knocks out a hard drive like this? How do I copy
over the
necessary files TO this drive to get it working again? OR.. how can I
access
this drive to pull the important files off? I tried cable selecting
it also.
No avail.

Will replacing the controller card work or is it strictly a disk
issue?

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Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

On 13 May 2004 14:06:18 -0700, muggle@numericnetwork.com (muggle) wrote:

>I have a Western Digital 13gb hard drive with important tax and
>financial information on it. Unfortunately, I got a virus on this
>drive, and when the
>virus was removed, the drive stopped working. Its recognized on boot
>and in
>bios, but when the machine boots, it wont begin. I tried slaving it,
>and
>scandisk pops up, but isn't able to access the disk. It just hangs at
>scandisk
>until I hit the power stud.
>
>When kind of virus knocks out a hard drive like this? How do I copy
>over the
>necessary files TO this drive to get it working again? OR.. how can I
>access
>this drive to pull the important files off? I tried cable selecting
>it also.
>No avail.
>
>Will replacing the controller card work or is it strictly a disk
>issue?

Try putting it on a IDE cable by itself after jumpering it in single mode.

--
Michael Cecil
http://home.comcast.net/~macecil/

Reply to Anonymous

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

"muggle":
> I have a Western Digital 13gb hard drive with important tax and
> financial information on it. Unfortunately, I got a virus on this
> drive, and when the
> virus was removed, the drive stopped working. Its recognized on boot
> and in
> bios, but when the machine boots, it wont begin.

Which virus? How was it removed?

Cable selecting it? You can't cable select among drives without a special
cable.

Some virii corrupt the master boot record, making the drive unbootable. One
way an MBR can be fixed is with fdisk. To do this you would create a boot
diskette on another system and copy fdisk.exe to the diskette. You would
then boot to the diskette, then run fdisk and ensure that the partition you
are trying to boot to is, in fact, the active partition. You would then run
fdisk /mbr to recreate the master boot record on the drive.

Suggest you first do a google search on fdisk /mbr to get more input as how
this works with current virus infections.

nf

Reply to Anonymous

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

This is a quote from '219' who claims to have done some fdisk /mbr testing:

"FDISK /MBR will clean
a boot sector virus from your PC only if the virus code in
sector 0,0,1 does not encroach into the PT area, *and* the virus
code did not modify the last 2 bytes of sector 0,0,1. Michelangelo
meets both these requirements (at least the strain we've seen here
does), and so FDISK /MBR works. But it is not a general-purpose
solution for every boot-sector virus."

The PT area is the partition table. If you have multiple partitions and the
table is destroyed you'd be in deep doo-doo.

Here's another option for you: put your bad drive on the secondary IDE
channel on another system and see if you can see your data.

nf

Reply to Anonymous

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

"nutso fasst" <no.replies@no.where.net> wrote in message news:1BSoc.48118$pI2.20850@newssvr29.news.prodigy.com...
> "muggle":
> > I have a Western Digital 13gb hard drive with important tax and
> > financial information on it. Unfortunately, I got a virus on this
> > drive, and when the
> > virus was removed, the drive stopped working. Its recognized on boot
> > and in
> > bios, but when the machine boots, it wont begin.
>
> Which virus? How was it removed?
>

> Cable selecting it?

> You can't cable select among drives without a special cable.

Unless you have a virus on the drive, obviously. Then it will work fine. *eg*

>
> Some virii corrupt the master boot record, making the drive unbootable. One
> way an MBR can be fixed is with fdisk. To do this you would create a boot
> diskette on another system and copy fdisk.exe to the diskette. You would
> then boot to the diskette, then run fdisk and ensure that the partition you
> are trying to boot to is, in fact, the active partition. You would then run
> fdisk /mbr to recreate the master boot record on the drive.
>
> Suggest you first do a google search on fdisk /mbr to get more input as how
> this works with current virus infections.
>
> nf
>
>
>
>

Reply to Anonymous

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

"Folkert Rienstra"
> Unless you have a virus on the drive, obviously. Then it will work fine.
*eg*

Hmm. Well, I guess it won't work any worse.

Reply to Anonymous

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