Virus or Bad Hard Drive?

[kirbyrj]

I'm trying to help a friend with their laptop (Toshiba Satellite, IDE 2.5" HDD). It attempts to boot into Windows XP Home with a Pre-SP2 Splash screen, but blue screens and reboots.

There is nothing important on the drive, so I decide I'll just do a fresh install. I boot off of a XP Home CD and I see a partition however, it won't let me delete that partition or install Windows to the partition. So I figure I'll just try booting using Gparted and delete the partition that way.

I boot up Gparted and see a 10.29GB NTFS partition. I delete the partition and save changes, but it won't remove the partition. When I boot back into Gparted, the partition is still there.

I also tried to pull the HDD and put it in my main machine running XP Pro via a USB adapter, but when the drive is inserted, no HDD tools will load. The Disk Management won't load. The SeaTools for Windows (Seagate drive) won't load. I'm not sure if the hard drive is bad or if there is a virus of some sort that won't let me overwrite the boot sectors.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[tiraides]

Did you simply place the HDD troubleshooting software on the USB drive, or did you format the USB drive beforehand to make it function as a bootable device?

Since you believe that your friend's hard drive may have a virus, have you tried using a bootable (from BIOS) antivirus program? Or a bootable version of DBAN to wipe the hard drive clean?

 

[nolifegeeks]

just look up the error code on the blue screen the 00000000x1 is an error code the 9 times out of ten tells ya what is going rong

 

[kirbyrj]

I'm going to try DBAN here right now. Something like that is what I'm looking for. Gparted just wasn't doing the job.

 

[tiraides]

I wasn't recommending DBAN for removing the partition, but for removing the virus.

But tells how everything goes after the DBAN wipe.

 

[kirbyrj]

It seems that DBAN locks up the computer after about 30 seconds of writing. I guess I'm leaning towards bad HDD now.

I also tried different methods of nuking it...even the basic writing everything with zeros didn't last longer than 32 seconds of writing.

 

[nolifegeeks]

well there is no virus I have ever had that can stop a nuke wipe program so I would say spend the $50- $90 bucks and get a 500 - 1t hard drive. nice little upgrade at least.