XP pro and Hard Drive Crash

So, last week when all the virus stuff was hitting the world, my computer flashed a blue screen saying that there was a critical problem with my hard drive and that I should restart it. I did and was unable to restart windows or anything else. After restarting I got a message to enter a boot disk in drive A. I tried to restore XP by booting using the original XP CD upgrade disk with no success. After several days of starting and restarting the PC all of a sudden it worked. Several times I got messages about scanning the disk for errors, and sometimes a messsage that there was no hard disk installed. I'm not sure why, but one day last week it started up. I immediately went to Microsoft and downloaded the patch (about the viruses) then went to Norton Antivirus, which I run regularly, and did all the stuff they said to check for the worm virus. None were found. I checked my hard drive for physical problems and defraged. All seemed to be OK for a week, then the same thing happened all over again and I get the same messages as above. Is my hard drive DEAD? If so, how can I get the files onto a new hard drive? PS I also got messages about a physical memory dump too.

 

Yes your hard drive is dead. If your lucky you havent lost everything yet!
Install a new hard drive, re-install windows. When all is well take a shot at throwing in your old hard drive as a slave and try to pull your data off.

 

Hi.

I would plug the hdd in the second IDE port with a different cable, even if you have to use the cable from the CD-ROM or another computer. This would eliminate the IDE port and cable as the problem. ALso, pull the power plug on the hdd and use another one.

If you get it running, look on the hdd for a file called MSBLAST.EXE. That's the blaster invader. It will be in the windows\system32 directory. Sounds like you may have the blaster.

Giles