starsun,

 

I would have downloaded HJT, but my DSL Internet connection is also gone from my computer.  I was on the phone with a tech for another two hours last night and they are assuming I have an error with my hard drive because after trying to reinstall microsoft and windows I got error messages and it wouldn't load and so now they have me running a resource diagnostic test on the hard drive.  They told me if this brings up errors also they will probablly have to replace my hard drive.  Does this sound right?  Could a virus or something have caused this to happen?  I have only had my computer for 10 months.  Will I loose everything I had saved in my hard drive?  Thanks for your help.

 

starsun,

 

When you reinstall your operating system, be sure your disconnected from the internet. I'm not sure where in the installation the error occurred, but it your machine has been comprimised by malware, then they may have an open 'channel' to that pc. If it has a static ip address from your isp, then as soon at they re-establish a connection (which can happen as soon as the NIC drivers and TCP/IP are reloaded - but before the entire windows installation is complete), your pc could be reinfected; ruining the 'clean' install and causing all types of problems.

 

They might have you boot from the diagnostics partition of the harddrive to run the tests. If not, ChrisM could tell you how to start a harddrive diagnostics test during bootup; it's ctrl-alt-d or something like that. Hopefully that will come up clean.

 

If malware has compromised your system, it possible to completely ruin the data on the harddrive, and make it difficult to restore the drive without knowing it's makup; number tracks, sector size and all that. That's usually stored somewhere on the drive itself. You can easily set this though in your BIOS.

 

I'm not sure about 'malware' physically damaging a harddrive, unless there's some documented -don't do's- when working with specific hardware and they do it. But this is highly unlikely.

 

If the information on the disk is already damaged, you couldv'e already lost it. You might try taking the existing harddrive out, putting a new harddrive in it's place, then reinstalling the old system drive as a second 'slave' drive. That way you can bootup from the new drive, then see if you can still access the old drive.

 

If windows doesn't recognize the drive, you might be able to find a dos recovery tool that will work with NTFS (i'm not sure), that may help recovery files even when windows doesn't recognize the drive.

 

Before you send the drive back for replacement, i'd try to do a low-level format on it, if for nothing else, to erase any personal data you have on it. Don't do a quick format, that won't completely erase everything. You can do this by using the windows installation diskette, just like when your trying to reinstall the os - just after formatting, turn you pc off and remove the harddrive.

 

Let me know how it turns out.

 

Mike.