Corrupt partition or virus?

[Guest]

Greetings,
I recently purchased a WD2000 drive for my home machine. Installed XP and
have been running it for a few months now – no problem. Last night I got an
error whe trying to open my email client (said it couldn’t find a particular
file). When I re-booted I got a message NTLDR missing. I proceeded to follow
all of the MS instructions on how to replace the boot files, etc , etc. Still
wasn’t able to get back into windows.

I checked the dir in the recovery DOS mode and all of the file names and
properties are now in some weird character language. So I decided to take a
look at the files by making the drive a slave to a different machine. I was
able to view the drive, but all of the folders (even the drive name) has
weird character names and I am unable to access them.

To me – it sounds like a corrupted partition or some type of virus. Any
words of wisdom on how to recover the data on the drive would be extremely
helpful and appreciated. Also, what would cause this if it was a corrupt
partition?

Thanks

 

[David H. Lipman]

Go to the hard disk manufacturer's web site and download their diagnostic software
respective to your hard disk. After the test, you will know if the hard disk is bad or
not..

Quantum/Maxtor - PowerMax
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

Western Digital - Data LifeGuard Tools (DLGDiag)
http://support.wdc.com/download/

Hitachi/IBM - Drive Fitness Test (DFT)
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Seagate - SeaTools
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

Fujitsu - Diagnostic Tool
http://www.fcpa.com/download/hard-drives/

Samsung - Disk manager
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/shdiag.htm


--
Dave






| Greetings,
| I recently purchased a WD2000 drive for my home machine. Installed XP and
| have been running it for a few months now - no problem. Last night I got an
| error whe trying to open my email client (said it couldn't find a particular
| file). When I re-booted I got a message NTLDR missing. I proceeded to follow
| all of the MS instructions on how to replace the boot files, etc , etc. Still
| wasn't able to get back into windows.
|
| I checked the dir in the recovery DOS mode and all of the file names and
| properties are now in some weird character language. So I decided to take a
| look at the files by making the drive a slave to a different machine. I was
| able to view the drive, but all of the folders (even the drive name) has
| weird character names and I am unable to access them.
|
| To me - it sounds like a corrupted partition or some type of virus. Any
| words of wisdom on how to recover the data on the drive would be extremely
| helpful and appreciated. Also, what would cause this if it was a corrupt
| partition?
|
| Thanks
|

 

[Linda B]

It sounds to me like drive and/or partition problems. There are very few
viruses out there that are capable of rendering entire directory structures
corrupt in the fashion you're describing, and I seriously doubt that any of
them are contractable over the internet; so unless you've been putting
dubious media into your computer (or intentionally downloading and
installing shady files) I don't think it's a virus.

It's entirely possible that you just bought a lemon of a hard drive -- after
spinning at 7200rpm for a couple of months, something easily could have gone
wrong with the read heads, or even on the surface of the drive -- but either
way it's much easier for me to imagine file/directory structure damage like
you describe taking place because of faulty hardware than virulent software.

I'd try running chkdsk on the drive, or a more comphrensive diskcheck
program if you have one available. If the program comes back with bad
sectors and the drive is still under warranty, I might take advantage of
that warranty.

--LB

 

[Guest]

If you have some data on the drive that you hope to recover there are
programs that will recover it even if the partition table is completetly
scrambled, as long as you haven't written to the drive.