Possible hard drive failure

[technocretin]

computer is a 64bit compaq running windows xp. It has bee affected badly by viruses and in particular 2 serious trojans one purporting to be microsoft security essentials advisor and which I eventually got ridof, the other was antimalware doctor which I was in the middle of getting rid of when the computer crashed, on turning it back on again the first screen displayed with motherboard details, memory configs, ide drive etc then it went blank a small line cursor blinked for a few seconds and then the screen went blank. The fans were going but the hard drive made a few seconds of rumbling and then went quiet. Prior to this when the computer was working the drive was very loud and seemed to be almost always writing to disc or revving. I assumed that was caused by the virus.

I have looked inside but can see no obvious problems, everything is seated ok and no obvious loose wires connections. I pressed f8 during the boot up and whatever option I choose about a half a page of code appears and then freezes. Is the drive dead, can information be gotten from it. I noticed Amazon have a Iomax usb hard drive device for recovering info, would this work?

 

[jsc]

Sounds like you have serious drive problems. Unplug the drive from your computer now. Do not put any more time on the drive.

Get a new drive and rebuild your system. Make sure you have current firewall and antivirus software installed.

Now, assuming that the drives are IDE, jumper the new drive for IDE Master and jumper the old drive for Slave. Reconnect the old drive, boot and try to transfer the data.

Depending on the condition of the old drive, this may work.

 

[Wamphryi]

Information can probably be retrieved from the HDD. It is a matter of attaching it to a PC that is up to date with anti virus software. The risk of course is that unless you have an external enclosure that will accomodate an IDE drive then you cant attach the drive to a running system that has its defences up. If you have to attach the drive internally you have to risk the system drive being infected on boot up. If the drive still wont work then consider a low level format.

 

[technocretin]

thanks so far but I am not convinced th hdd has failed just will not boot. I had at least 2 trojans both fake anti virus trojans, I got rid of one but the other has got into or corrupted something in the boot up sequence. I am running AVG rescue disk and it says it has identified trojan horse generic 16.CAOB win32/patched.DX; Object is white listed critical system file should not be removed, Ireally need to know how to proceed when the scan is finished and it asks what to do ie delete, rename etc

 

[technocretin]

latest news is that rescue cd says not infected and I an now boot as far as the first windows screen the one withe the blue flashing line, but after a while the screen goes black and it reboots and is in a loop. I pressed F8 and turned off the reboot and got a blue screen with a C000021a. I am so close to cracking this please anyone how do I fix this?