Major Virus?...maybe..Bad WD?

[shawshank62]

Well, as some of you may know, my wd crapped out on me, or so i thought. anyway, i decide to put the wd floppy in and copy my backup drive over to the wd. I do it, and it looks like it works now, but.....when it reboots, the system is running at 1243mhz basically 100fsb (its a 2600xp). so ok, i go to restart, and i think its maybe a virus, but it comes up running 166fsb now, ok good. anyway, i go to put nortons on, and the system locks....a little weird. then when its loading, it says it cant find the western....and the maxtor shows up as
M (upside down T, very tiny) X (upside down T, very tiny) O (then about 10 A's wiht a tilda on top) R.

It looked like some hacked crap or something, well i put in the maxtor floppy to format everything, im tired of this crap, just wanna format. well it starts the floppy, the system shuts down..... ........i try again, same thing. so then i put in the maxblast 3 cd....doesnt read.....i say ok....ill put the W98 cd, and it starts but says cant find any hard drives.....so i disconnect the WD and then try again, and right now im installing 98. Im not sure what to attribute this full blown crash to, but im guessing its either a virus (i was behind a router and running zone alarm, unfortunaley for about 24 hours, i had no antivirus running) or the WD screwed up everything. Yesterday the system would not boot because of disk failure, but i wanted to be totally sure so that is why i copied everything over to it. So im installing 98 now and my question is, should i even attempt to clear this hd and reinstall (it has been grinding for about the past 2 months, and is not being detected any more) or should i just RMA it, its only about 8 months old?

any thoughts to what actually crashed the system, my main guess is the hard drive, but im not totally sure. thx.

shaw

[sup3rcarrx7]

Your problem kind of sounds like that new blaster worm virus. Go download the program to remove the worm from your computer on www.windows.com somewhere (sorry forgot where it exactly was).

[shawshank62]

well i dont have anything anymore, it wouldnt boot, thus i cannot install.

i installed 98 but it will not go past the logo screen, so i will try using maxblast now and then installing 98......Maxblast floppy will not work, and the cd begins to load and then says IDE CD-ROM device manager driver installed, and does nothing else.

[Wizzard~Of~Ozz]

I've had a drive that had constant corruption of the FAT, I used WD's diag software to low level format the drive, then Fdisked and formatted, cleared the problem up (caused by excessive FSB overclocking)

Just a thought on what to try, also the WD software will run a diagnostic on the drive to report any errors the drive may have.

Make a barebones boot disk (win98 just format and select copy system files) then copy the WDDIag.exe file to the disk, boot with it and run it. see what it comes up with.

Also I vaguely remember a problem with a certain HD (can't remember the manufacturer) that would die because of a firmware problem.

edit: just read

(it has been grinding for about the past 2 months, and is not being detected any more) or should i just RMA it, its only about 8 months old?

call them, you will probably get it RMA'd and you should if it;s been grinding.

[shawshank62]

well i decided to hook my maxtor up to another computer, works fine, boots, no problems. brought it back over to my computer, first i cleared the cmos, then put it in, it wont go past the logo screen. So.....i think it may be a virus on the mobo. so what do i do now?

Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro

[SeanC]

BIOS problems? If you can RMA it, then do that. Let THEM deal with the problem or give you a replacement.

Sean

[shawshank62]

Well i got an Epox 8rda+, and everything went in smoothly. Im gonna RMA that board back to Gigabyte, im guessing it was a bios problem or maybe a capicator...i dont know. thx for the help.