Hardware

[Melman41]

So I was working on a Dell laptop for a buddy of mine, running Malwarebytes to get rid of virus's and what have you. He had been running AVG the Free version and Symantec. Malwarebytes found over 500 items, 5 trojans, and the rest addware stuff. So after cleaning up his machine running in XP Safe mode, I restarted it to load in regular mode, and found all the user accounts had been removed and I couldn't get back in. So I inserted the XP disk, ran repair and was then able to gain access. Only to find the WIFI no longer worked and the only user account available was the Administrator.

I off loaded all the important stuff. Then went to wipe the hard drive and load a fresh copy of XP, only to discover XP could not format the drive because it was damaged.

So, did the malware damage the hard drive or was it already damaged by something else?

And, can malware damage hardware?

I'd like to know.

Thanks,

Melman

[rgabbard]

It's possible that the virus infected the mbr of the disk. In which case you'd need to wipe it clean with something like dban. Did you try deleting the partitions and recreating them? That might help...

[CWB]

yep ... it is possible for a virus to hammer a hard drive .

it gets itself into the low level side of the drive and will reside there .

many years ago there was a nasty virus on the loose called "natas" ... it basically destroyed the low level (boot sector) of the HD , the fix was to spend a few hours trying to fix it with DOS tools or replace the drive .

a few years ago there was a virus loosed that basically did the same thing .

a friend of mine was a tech for a comp company and also did tech work for a couple of fair sized businesses ...

he hired me on to help him replace the hard drives in a whole bunch of machines , reload windows , etc ...

there were several boxes of hard drives to be unpacked ... the old drives were whacked with a #2 ball-peen hammer and disposed of .