Banjaxed Harddrives

M

MissRibena

Guest
Hi everyone

I was reformatting a friend's computer that had been riddled with viruses, spyware, the works, at the weekend. She had bought it from a guy who turned out to be a cowboy with hindsight and had no drivers, no windows cd, miscellaneous wires in the tower unit not connected to anything etc. CD ROM drive was labouring and I had my doubts that it would make it. Anyway, HDD gave up just as I returned it to her and was loading on the printer driver. On rebooting, I got the Blue Screen of death with STOP message basically saying that HDD was inaccessible and no amount of Safe Mode etc. type booting could bypass it.

This would not be all that surprising, except my other friend has just phoned to report the same thing with her computer. She was equally neglectful as regards anti-virus software etc but it was a Dell, so not a total cowboy job.

Could these incidents be related? Is there some death-knell virus out there at the moment or is it all coincidental?

Thanks a mil
Rebecca
 
She had bought it from a guy who turned out to be a cowboy with hindsight and had no drivers, no windows cd, miscellaneous wires in the tower unit not connected to anything etc.

Few, if any, hard disks these days (especially IDE drives) need special drivers and are fully supported by those built into the operating system (e.g. Windows, GNU/Linux etc.). The lack of licensed Windows installation media or recovery media is a bit dodgy but would not be unusual for, say, a second hand PC since many people may not appreciate the licensing issues. It is not unusual for there to be many wires inside a PC case (e.g. additional IDE or power cables) is not unusual and not necessarily the sign of anything untoward.

CD ROM driver was labouring

What precisely do you mean?

. Anyway, HDD gave up just as I returned it to her and was loading on the printer driver. On rebooting, I got the Blue Screen of death with STOP message basically saying that HDD was inaccessible and no amount of Safe Mode etc. type booting could bypass it.

Are you sure that the hard disk itself and not just the Windows installation is at fault here? The "blue screen of death" often occurs when drivers are faulty or mis-installed. The error you got could be because the master boot record is damaged or missing.

If the hard drive was formatted for FAT rather than NTFS then you could try booting into DOS to see if you can read it. This site is useful for getting various boot disk images. You might want to try searching for information on restoring the Windows master boot record in case this is relevant here. You could also download Knoppix or [broken link removed] (c. 700MB downloads) and boot them to see if the disk is still intact (don't write to NTFS partitions under these GNU/Linux distributions though unless you have the Captive NTFS drivers installed and working!).

Could these incidents be related? Is there some death-knell virus out there at the moment or is it all coincidental?

They could be related but without more concrete evidence I wouldn't jump to conclusions.
 
Hi Clubman

Thanks for the reply. It really think it was a dodgy job or else she was very unlucky; no driver for TFT monitor, wireless mouse & keyboard, nor modem as well as none for sound card, graphics etc. Absolutely no software (not even product recovery type stuff) at all came with the computer which was supposedly new but I reckon was patched together. The only reason we opened it was because the floppy drive had never been attached to the front panel and had gone back inside the computer. There were speaker cables (I am not codding) inside the computer and a bundle of other wires.

CD ROM driver was labouring
Click to expand...
It didn't sound healthy to me before the format. The drive-check thing on start up sounded louder than any I heard before. It might well have been fine but it made you hold your breath to see if it would make it every time it was used.

The original OS was Windows 2000 ME. I couldn't get a copy of this, so we used Windows 2000 Professional. It was Pentium4, 128MB RAM. Windows 2000 Professional had been going along fine for a couple of days at my house while I set up her internet connection etc. before returning. I changed her internet account in case her username was being watched for.

I wanted to try and run something like fixdisk but I couldn't get the PC to boot into DOS - I tried booting it on every option available (safe mode, command prompt, vga, last known safe config etc), but it always returned to the same blue screen. When it first started happening first I thought it was the CD ROM drive because of the noise, so I disabled it as a boot device in the BIOS but that didn't work either.

Rebecca
 
It really think it was a dodgy job or else she was very unlucky; no driver for TFT monitor, wireless mouse & keyboard, nor modem as well as none for sound card, graphics etc. Absolutely no software (not even product recovery type stuff) at all came with the computer which was supposedly new but I reckon was patched together. The only reason we opened it was because the floppy drive had never been attached to the front panel and had gone back inside the computer. There were speaker cables (I am not codding) inside the computer and a bundle of other wires.

Was this a second hand private sale or somebody assembling/selling new PCs commercially? If it was the latter then it sounds a bit dodgy all right.

It didn't sound healthy to me before the format.

Cheap (and sometimes cheerful) CD drives can sometimes be quite noisy. It doesn't necessarily indicate a problem with the drive capabilities though.

The original OS was Windows 2000 ME

Windows 2000 or Windows Me? There is no such thing as Windows 2000 ME. If you upgraded or reinstalled to Windows 2000 then 128MB may be a bit tight depending on what else is running.

I wanted to try and run something like fixdisk but I couldn't get the PC to boot into DOS

You may need to get a DOS boot disk image and boot from that so. However if the drive was NTFS formatted then DOS will not be able to read it anyway unless you can get DOS mode NTFS drivers or a floppy based minimal Windows boot image (such as from the site I mentioned above).

My approach would be to get to the bottom of the drive issues and see if it's a master boot record problem and if the drive itself is intact. If you had upgraded from the original Windows installation to Windows 2000 then, depending on how things are going - or not, I would consider a full reinstall from scratch (having first backed up any important files and having assembled the required hardware specific drivers).
 
Thanks Clubman. Will give your suggestion a whirl. Yep we went from ME to 2000 - sorry for the confusion on that. The PC was bought from a shop as new from a guy that has now closed down.

It is still strange how both computers (roughly the same age) have the same error on the same weekend. The second computer had not been reinstalled or anything like that at all.

Rebecca
 
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