Week or so ago, one of my disks (400gb) disappeared from My Computer in windows XP Pro.

Showed in bios and under computer management (but showed as not initialised).

This disk had over 5 years of family photos and movies, and just short of 30gb of family music, along with various games, dvd movies, programs, C:\ images, etc. (Most of this was backed up couple of months ago on external drive, so not total loss).

After downloading and trying about 20 different programs to get disk recognised in windows, reformated, find all files, it finally worked, and had just got to stage of backing up the files, when computer crashed with blue screen fatal error.

I tried number of times to start windows, but it would always crash with blue screen fatal error before it got to log in screen.

Thought I'd be able to repair XP using the windows xp disk, and changed bios to boot from CD first. However, this is being ignored, and computer is always trying to boot from disk (C:\).

I changed bios again, this time removing the disks from the boot up sequence, so it only has the cd in boot sequence. But, pc continues to ignore cd (although cd drive spins up) and boots up from disk (and subsequently crashes).

I thought it might be corrupt bios issue, so thought about trying to update bios, but pc expects bios update to be on a floppy, which my machine doesn't have. Bios won't recognise usb pen drive.

It's possible that one of the many programs I downloaded for trying to rescue my 400gb drive had virus in it, but unfortunatelly, it was this drive that had all my antivirus (AVG, Spybot and AdAware) on it, and I never thought to download these again and put on my c drive.

Is this likely to be a virus?

Any ideas on how I can get my bios to boot from cd and ignore disks?

Thanks.

Edit: Surfing forum from work pc, so won't be able to look at this topic too frequently.

Does it boot from the CD if the CD drive is the only drive plugged in (ie, remove any HDDs).

If the HDD is SATA, you can unplug it so you only have the CD drive in, boot, then hot-swap it back in again.

Quote :

Week or so ago, one of my disks (400gb) disappeared from My Computer in windows XP Pro.

Showed in bios and under computer management (but showed as not initialised).

After downloading and trying about 20 different programs to get disk recognised in windows, reformated, find all files, it finally worked, and had just got to stage of backing up the files, when computer crashed with blue screen fatal error.

are you sure it's not dead, or at least dying?

Hi

Should have said, but disks are IDE (not raid, striped or anything) with C:\ as master and large (400gb) drive as slave. CD is other master.

Large drive may well be dying - which is why I wanted last few files off it that I hadn't yet backed up. Mainly family photos which I've already deleted from digital cameras and phone.

I've just managed to get couple of new round ide cables from work, so I'll check tonight to make sure the original cables aren't the issue.

Didn't really want to pc apart and unplug drives; that's why I hid them in the bios.

Still doesn't explain why pc not booting up from my original xp disk when it's the only thing showing in the bios boot up choices.

Are you sure your CD drive is still working? Try sticking another bootable CD in the drive and see if it boots from it. Unless the Original XP CD is scratched or something, the only reason it won't boot up from it, if the CD Drive is the 1st option boot drive is if the drive itself, (or IDE channel), is faulty.

...maybe the old C: drive has had it. Get this, swap the 400gb drive for master and leave the original C drive out of the equation.

Boot up the live CD linked above and create a ~15 GB NTFS partition in empty space, then boot the XP install disk selecting the new partition as C.

GL


E;

Quote :

This disk had over 5 years of family photos and movies, and just short of 30gb of family music, along with various games, dvd movies, programs, C:\ images, etc. (Most of this was backed up couple of months ago on external drive, so not total loss).

erm, I thought you said the 400gb was backup and C: was the OS drive - I iz now confuzed(unless the C:\images folder properties was set to be located on 400gb drive???)

Thanks all for the suggestions - will let you know how I get on.

Swapped the ide cable out last night, and still same problems.

Quote from CSU1 :

...erm, I thought you said the 400gb was backup and C: was the OS drive - I iz now confuzed(unless the C:\images folder properties was set to be located on 400gb drive???)

Having had a few hard disks fail over the years (mainly maxtor that were my boot drive), I've now got in habit of putting all photos, music, documents, digital media, etc, onto the backup disk. Maybe I should have called it a data/backup disk cause as well as data, I also kept couple of images of my C:\ on it too. And my registry backups. And my network setting backups. And all my hardware drivers.....

....just realised LFS on was on "backup" disk, so I've lost all my newer car sets, layouts, etc., that I probably haven't backed up for last few months.

Ok, slaved my non working C:\ to an old PII, and loaded Avast! anti virus, which I ran last night.

Got up this morning to find that every single .exe file on the slaved C:\ drive has been got at by a win32/VIRUT virus!

(extract from Avast! site:
Win32:Virut is a polymorphic file infector with some additional features. It spreads all around the drive and infects even files infected by another virus previously. The only symptoms are a strange HDD activity while infecting, and also unwanted TCP traffic. Virut tries to connect you into an IRC network under the user name "Virtu" and zombify you. Unfortunately, the cleaning of this virus is very difficult or almost impossible).

AVG do a VIRUT removal tool, so I'll try that tonight and see how I get on.

Quote from sinanju :

Ok, slaved my non working C:\ to an old PII, and loaded Avast! anti virus, which I ran last night.

Got up this morning to find that every single .exe file on the slaved C:\ drive has been got at by a win32/VIRUT virus!

(extract from Avast! site:
Win32:Virut is a polymorphic file infector with some additional features. It spreads all around the drive and infects even files infected by another virus previously. The only symptoms are a strange HDD activity while infecting, and also unwanted TCP traffic. Virut tries to connect you into an IRC network under the user name "Virtu" and zombify you. Unfortunately, the cleaning of this virus is very difficult or almost impossible).

AVG do a VIRUT removal tool, so I'll try that tonight and see how I get on.

Any luck getting rid of the virus?

if it doesn't work you can try MalwareBytes AntiMalware, it removes almost every virus, trojan, spyware.

i believe the virut definition is included in the windows malicious software removal tool... but don't quote me on that.

Hi, and thanks all.

Had day off work on Monday, so put lot of effort into this, and finally got rid of the VIRUT virus - unfortunately, that had also allowed a lot of other nasty virii on my C:\ drive!

Had to run AVG virut removal, Microsoft's Windows malicious software removal tool (why do they hide it so well? And why do I bother with all these XP security update downloads?), Spybot, Ad-aware, ProcessGuard, avast!, Malwarebytes anti-malware, and Etrust Pestpatrol (free version - this wouldn't delete trojans, etc., but does tell you where in registry they're hiding - had to use Resplendence's Registry Manager Lite to get rid of things in registry as regedit, msconfig and task manager all inaccessible).

Ran these all twice just to make sure, and all now say my boot up drive is virus free.

Put this drive back in computer, and when I started up, it loaded xp from cd (wouldn't allow this before) - I had forgot to put bios back to normal. When I changed bios back to boot from disk, it worked too, and I can get back into windows.

This should teach me not to just download software willy-nilly from the web!

Now that I'm back at work, and having related my woes to the engineers here, I've been told that in future I should use a program called "sandboxie" for testing downloads - it 'runs programs in a sandbox environment without writing to the hard drive'.

Now that I know this, might have another try at resurrecting my dead 400gb drive (which got me into all this bother in the first place!).

Again, thanks for the advice and concern.