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.