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Possible MBR virus

Malak

Malak

Lifer
Laptop stops working, comes into shop. Thing won't boot up, sounds like something is wrong with the harddrive. Decide to slave it in another desktop to take the data off and then replace the harddrive. Boot failure. Now the laptop is dead and the desktop is dead. BIOS in both says no IDE device installed.

Real tempted to plug the harddrive into another tower to be sure, but then I don't really want to kill another harddrive without knowing how to fix this. Can't FDISK if nothing can detect the harddrive.... what do I do?
 
Update:

Tried another harddrive and new cables, nothing works now, seems it may be a BIOS virus 🙁
 
Put it in a USB external enclosure and connect it as a slave drive (DO NOT BOOT FROM IT) on a PC running Linux. Do a full virus scan of the drive from there before doing anything else. Once you determine that the drive is clean, then you can start trying to recover files.

If the drive won't read in the enclosure, I'd suspect that there's something wrong with the controller in the drive and it shorted out the IDE controller in the laptop and the desktop (hopefully not in the enclosure as well).
 
No linux, only Windows.

That doesn't explain why suddenly the other harddrive no longer works either.
 
Plugging 2nd drive into enclosure, but laptop drive wasn't detected at all. 2nd drive is detected, going from there...
 
Originally posted by: montag451
Just check if the suspect drive, if plugged into IDE with 2.5=3.5 adaptor shows up in the BIOS.
Click to expand...

It doesn't. Testing some more on the other drive since it was detected in the enclosure even though it's not detected in the BIOS on it's home machine. The laptop drive was not detected even in the enclosure.

Swapping out a laptop harddrive right now and testing the other drive further.
 
Well we gave up on that laptop drive, just put a different one into the laptop and will be installing windows now. Couldn't even recover data because nothing could detect the drive, must be something on the drive that isn't working.

Still doesn't explain why suddenly our desktop stopped working after plugging the laptop drive in. Now that desktop won't detect it's harddrive...
 
Well seems like the Primary IDE is dead, that's why it wasn't detecting the desktop drive anymore. The laptop drive may have killed it somehow, but it seems to be an issue that we may never know what happened.
 
One thing you might want to try would be Spinrite6.
It is possible, though i haven't experienced this firsthand, for it to detect some drives that haven't been detected by BIOS - it may depend on what is the prob with the drive.

Just a thought if the data is worth lots to you.
 
The desktop suddenly shutdown in the middle of operation and is back to not detecting the harddrive. What can possibly cause this?
 
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