Hard drive failure, boot / Firmware virus or what?

[CZroe]

Last night, I used a floppy for sneakernetting a printer driver onto someone's old Baby-AT system because my spare SCSI CD-ROM did not work and he was missing the tray (Or caddy). My friend stuck it in my laptop and my brother booted with it in there, but the laptop is not what is affected. My file server, where the printer driver (Downloaded straight from HP) was extracted and put on floppy, will not boot. It was hibernated after the driver was obtained. Upon restoring, booting was paused while the (NON-BOOT!)RAID Array was displayed as Critical and Rebuilding. This is normal for me except when I checked the drive assignments none of the drives had dropped out of the array (One of the 1200JBs has slightly different capacity and Promise says that it's WD's sensitivity to accoustical noise. That issue will soon be solved as I bought three more 1200JB drives.). Normally, the problem drive is missing from the array until I restart and then it rebuilds. Not a problem though, I can still get the server booted so I can scan an important document. Or so I thought.

"Boot Failure System Halted" on my 1000JB boot drive.
Can't figure out why. It's spinning up, connected, not clicking and seems functional in every way. Then I checked the BIOS and found this string as reported by the IDE device detection:
WDC WD1010KB-01CSA1
WD1010KB? It should be WD1000JB right? Or is this simply a serial number that's very similar to a model number? Could my drive's firmware have been modified? The BIOS reports a capacity of 95,396MB. I assume that's real binary MB and not decimal Jibibytes or whatever they're called. I was using a WDDIAG disk after deleting the contents I never executed anything on it or allowed the system to attempt to boot off of it. It was previously unused (Actually pulled it out of one of my old WD HDD boxes). I still can't shake the thought that it's a virus spread by floppy though...

Besides connecting as a secondary drive in another PC, what else can I do? What is the command instead of FDISK /MBR? FIXMBR? Can anyone answer my question about model number vs. serial number? If it is supposed to be the model number, is there a known virus which does modify this? Thanks!

 

[CZroe]

And after a long while writing this... now it works. I'd bet it's vibrations from having seven drives in the system. It usually sits vertically but has been horizontal for the past couple of days so I bet the vibrations were worse. The boot drive is in its own 5.25" bay, but I can still feel that there are vibrations strong enough to be felt and restricted by my hand. Vibrations. This is probably what Promise meant by "accoustical noise" causing that one drive to drop out of the array.

 

[mechBgon]

Well, first question: do you have up-to-date antivirus software and is it configured to scan all files (including inside .EXEs and compressed files) with heuristics enabled, real-time, no exceptions? If you do, then the likelihood of a successful virus infection isn't too high... the virus would need to be one that the AV software doesn't recognize.

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Well, first question: do you have up-to-date antivirus software and is it configured to scan all files (including inside .EXEs and compressed files) with heuristics enabled, real-time, no exceptions? If you do, then the likelihood of a successful virus infection isn't too high... the virus would need to be one that the AV software doesn't recognize.

Sadly, no. All trial versions of Norton and McAfee have recently expired and I've been planning on reinstalling the OS for a couple months now. I have made sure that every patch and update is applied and scan for all the latest threats using dedicated tools from the big AV companies. Technically, with good heuristic scanning, it's not supposed to have to recognize the virus to stop it Only the code's virus-like activity.

And it has gone back from WDC WD1010KB-01CSA1 to being detected as WDC WD1000JB-00CRA1 so I doubt there's a virus to be worried about. It seems that something was interfering (Perhaps the use of EIGHT IDE data cables following along eachother) or that vibrations could somehow cause it to report the wrong model number (If so, why isn't that stored in firmware instead of on-disk?).

EDIT: Hmm... The system just hibernated itself while I was busy typing this on the laptop. I guess I do still have some strange behavior here.