virus found, hard drive ...dead?

I have a Western Digital 13gb hard drive with important tax and
financial information on it. Unfortunately, I got a virus on this
drive, and when the
virus was removed, the drive stopped working. Its recognized on boot
and in
bios, but when the machine boots, it wont begin. I tried slaving it,
and
scandisk pops up, but isn't able to access the disk. It just hangs at
scandisk
until I hit the power stud.

When kind of virus knocks out a hard drive like this? How do I copy
over the
necessary files TO this drive to get it working again? OR.. how can I
access
this drive to pull the important files off? I tried cable selecting
it also.
No avail.

Will replacing the controller card work or is it strictly a disk
issue?

"muggle" wrote in message
om...
I have a Western Digital 13gb hard drive with important tax and
financial information on it. Unfortunately, I got a virus on this
drive, and when the
virus was removed, the drive stopped working. Its recognized on boot
and in
bios, but when the machine boots, it wont begin. I tried slaving it,
and
scandisk pops up, but isn't able to access the disk. It just hangs at
scandisk

Do *NOT* run Scandisk in situations like these !!!!!!!!!!

until I hit the power stud.

When kind of virus knocks out a hard drive like this? How do I copy
over the
necessary files TO this drive to get it working again? OR.. how can I
access
this drive to pull the important files off? I tried cable selecting
it also.
No avail.

Will replacing the controller card work or is it strictly a disk
issue?


Probalbly file system corruption, try a data (file) recovery utility. One
such utility is available from the website in my signature (iRecover) but
there are plenty of similar tools around. Note that support on iRecover is
not handled through usenet.

--
Good luck,
Joep

D I Y D a t a R e c o v e r y . N L - Data & Disaster Recovery Tools

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl
http://www.diydatarecovery.com

"muggle":
I have a Western Digital 13gb hard drive with important tax and
financial information on it. Unfortunately, I got a virus on this
drive, and when the
virus was removed, the drive stopped working. Its recognized on boot
and in
bios, but when the machine boots, it wont begin.

Which virus? How was it removed?

Cable selecting it? You can't cable select among drives without a special
cable.

Some virii corrupt the master boot record, making the drive unbootable. One
way an MBR can be fixed is with fdisk. To do this you would create a boot
diskette on another system and copy fdisk.exe to the diskette. You would
then boot to the diskette, then run fdisk and ensure that the partition you
are trying to boot to is, in fact, the active partition. You would then run
fdisk /mbr to recreate the master boot record on the drive.

Suggest you first do a google search on fdisk /mbr to get more input as how
this works with current virus infections.

nf

This is a quote from '219' who claims to have done some fdisk /mbr testing:

"FDISK /MBR will clean
a boot sector virus from your PC only if the virus code in
sector 0,0,1 does not encroach into the PT area, *and* the virus
code did not modify the last 2 bytes of sector 0,0,1. Michelangelo
meets both these requirements (at least the strain we've seen here
does), and so FDISK /MBR works. But it is not a general-purpose
solution for every boot-sector virus."

The PT area is the partition table. If you have multiple partitions and the
table is destroyed you'd be in deep doo-doo.

Here's another option for you: put your bad drive on the secondary IDE
channel on another system and see if you can see your data.

nf

"nutso fasst" wrote in message . com...
"muggle":
I have a Western Digital 13gb hard drive with important tax and
financial information on it. Unfortunately, I got a virus on this
drive, and when the
virus was removed, the drive stopped working. Its recognized on boot
and in
bios, but when the machine boots, it wont begin.

Which virus? How was it removed?


Cable selecting it?

You can't cable select among drives without a special cable.

Unless you have a virus on the drive, obviously. Then it will work fine. *eg*


Some virii corrupt the master boot record, making the drive unbootable. One
way an MBR can be fixed is with fdisk. To do this you would create a boot
diskette on another system and copy fdisk.exe to the diskette. You would
then boot to the diskette, then run fdisk and ensure that the partition you
are trying to boot to is, in fact, the active partition. You would then run
fdisk /mbr to recreate the master boot record on the drive.

Suggest you first do a google search on fdisk /mbr to get more input as how
this works with current virus infections.

nf

"Folkert Rienstra"
Unless you have a virus on the drive, obviously. Then it will work fine.
*eg*

Hmm. Well, I guess it won't work any worse.