HDD Crash

[Tink]

A friend's computer has completely crash & I'm trying to help him determine whether it's a harddrive problem or WinXP or a virus. It goes thru all the checks when it starts up & mentions a primary HDD error. I go into the setup & ask it to autodetect the hard drive, which it does, but when I put in the system restore CD or the WinXP cd to re-install or repair it tells me there's no hard drive present. I can get to a dos prompt with a boot disk & can bring up the directory of the C drive, but it's not showing any Windows files, data files or anything but basic stuff. It still is under warranty so if it's the hard drive that can be replaced, but before I send him off to the warranty depot I'd like to ensure it's not an operating system thing or virus. Can u suggest how i can go about checking it out further? Is there a good virus checker I can load on a disk & run? Thanks so much.

[meese]

One way is to remove the drive and stick it in another XP system as a slave. See if you can read the drive from this system. If this system has antivirus software, run it on the bad drive to make sure there are no viruses.

[eagle1]

Doas meese says.
If You can't detect the hard drive on that other system, then you might be out of luck and probably lost the hard drive!