Is it my Raptor or malware?

[ClickCardo]

I was having booting problems with my XP Pro on my Raptor. I ran WDC's extended diagnostics and found no errors so I thought it was a virus. I posted on the OS sub-forum where you can see the background details.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1154640

In the mean time I took out my main data drive, disconnected the boot and put a new spare drive to be the boot. I then booted from Windows XP Pro install disk deleted partition then re-created partion and formatted it before clean install of XP. Next I added the chipset drivers and then I installed my Zone Alarm Security Suite all without being hooked up to the web. After turning that on I went to Windows Update and installed evry critical update necessary as well as some optional software/hardware ones including IE7. I installed Speedfan, Nero and a shredder and then the trial version of True Image 10.0. I then made a complete disk image backup of the boot drive and placed it on my second data drive which I had left in the pc. I also successfully burned some CD's. Finally, I was able to boot the trial True Image boot CD and was able to get right up to the last step before doing a restore. Finally I had ZA virus/spy scan my drives with none found.

I surfed a few well known safe websites with IE7 and burned some CD's to communicate with the pc I'm writing this on. Everything very swell. I then reconnected the original boot drive and made sure it was now just another data drive. I could not access it's primary partition, but was able to get some data files off it's extended partition. I next tried to boot off a hard drive diagnostic CD and True Image boot CD's to no avail. I then was able to boot into regular Windows fine. I deleted all the partitions off the original boot drive. I was then able to boot the hard drive diagnostic CD and zero'ed the original boot drive. Rebooting into Windows went fine and I created a primary and extended partition on the original boot drive which I formatted. I was able to copy a file to the original drive. So it seems to work but for the following.

I tried to boot off the True Image boot CD's to no avail again. Can you tell from it if I am infected with malware? Maybe the True Image trial boot CD has a time limit?

Note: I disconnected the original Raptor drive and now I can boot of the True Image boot CD and successfully restore an image. There's something strange when the Raptor is installed though Windows appears to run normally except for this boot issue. I also ended up buying True Image and making a boot disk off that. Same problem with Raptor HDD and no problem without it.

Any help determining if it's just a hardware problem will be much appreciated.

[leSLIe]

i had a similar problem 3 years ago but with a Seagate HD, at that time i didn´t care much about it, what the disk died shortly after that, i just hope that is not your case. It end up being an electromechanical problem, the reason for that was a lousy PSU.

ZoneAlarm is a good "firewall" app but when it comes to spyware it´s not that good u can check out this thread for some good antispyware appz

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1155516

[ClickCardo]

Today I was working with my builder's tech support. We found when the Raptor was connected as a data drive True Image would not boot off it's CD. When it wasn't TI would. This was repeatable. They would not let me RMA the system until I removed all drives but the original Raptor and tried to boot CD install XP on that. I did. I used the install to un-partition/re-partition and full format it. I successfully installed Xp on it. And now with just the Raptor I can boot the TI CD.

Could I have had a MBR virus on it? If it had it was it passed to the other disks that are now disconnected? Where do I go from here? I do not want to just keep installing software and disks only to do it over.