Virus that kills motherboard or hard drive?

[gtsukada]

ok so here is the situation, my friend is coming over with a hard drive with a possible virus? it has already killed her current setup. the system fan and cpu fan spin, but it will not post. so she goes to fry's gets an ecs combo and the same thing happens. well her housemate decides to look at it and he sticks it in his computer. he no longer has a computer that boots. can anybody tell me what this sounds like and possible advice to extract all her vital information off her hard drive. i was thinking about booting into dos and just taking everything off, but even this makes me a little nervous.

 

[pelikan]

Put it in a machine without any other drives, back up only what you can't live without (if possible). Then use a utility from the hard drive manufacturer to do a low level format. Re-intall windows. Before putting the backed up files back on there scan them with a good virus scanner and a trojan scanner while they are still on a CD, then put them back.

 

[BmXStuD]

Originally posted by: gtsukada
ok so here is the situation, my friend is coming over with a hard drive with a possible virus? it has already killed her current setup. the system fan and cpu fan spin, but it will not post. so she goes to fry's gets an ecs combo and the same thing happens. well her housemate decides to look at it and he sticks it in his computer. he no longer has a computer that boots. can anybody tell me what this sounds like and possible advice to extract all her vital information off her hard drive. i was thinking about booting into dos and just taking everything off, but even this makes me a little nervous.

SEEMS PRETTY STUPID TO ME. If it killed more than one pc why would someone put it into there pc. Maybe its got a bootsector virus. Does it get a post screen or just a blank monitor. Or maybe the hdd is broke and sending too much volts to the mobo and pop its gone but thats my only wackie thought.

 

[LongCoolMother]

Originally posted by: BmXStuD

Originally posted by: gtsukada
ok so here is the situation, my friend is coming over with a hard drive with a possible virus? it has already killed her current setup. the system fan and cpu fan spin, but it will not post. so she goes to fry's gets an ecs combo and the same thing happens. well her housemate decides to look at it and he sticks it in his computer. he no longer has a computer that boots. can anybody tell me what this sounds like and possible advice to extract all her vital information off her hard drive. i was thinking about booting into dos and just taking everything off, but even this makes me a little nervous.

SEEMS PRETTY STUPID TO ME. If it killed more than one pc why would someone put it into there pc. Maybe its got a bootsector virus. Does it get a post screen or just a blank monitor. Or maybe the hdd is broke and sending too much volts to the mobo and pop its gone but thats my only wackie thought.

what i was thinking. could either be a hardware defect, over volting the other components. or, it could a virus, writing over the boot sector, or entering the BIOS code

 

[earthman]

There are a number of viruses that will try to write over the BIOS, but alot of boards now won't allow that. I would be very cautious with this thing, to avoid ruining even more computers. I'm not aware that a hard drive can overvolt a MB, the HD gets power, not sends it out...its hard to imagine it causing this kind of problem.

 

[Twilling]

Maybe there is short in the Hard Drive causing other devices to fail. Whatever the case the Drive sounds dangerous. If there is critical information on the drive she may want to try a data revovery service.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Yeah, just liked mentioned I think its a hardware problem. Either the Hard Drive is just bad or its having voltage problems. A virus can't do that because a virus can only damage it through software and not any of the hardware. Have you tried put ting your HD in her system?

 

[CTho9305]

if you have a mobo that you can back up the BIOS on... drop it in there but BOOT FROM CD... specifically a knoppix linux cd. then use dd to zero-fill the disk. i would guess that it has some virus in the bootsector that is trying to flash the bios. Of course, if it is a power poroblem, it would kill the motherboard before the POST finished.

 

[jvang125]

had the same problem before. it's defintely a bootsector virus. on my old machine, the BIOS was not flashable so all the virus did was corrupted the boot files and partition info on the hard drive. without knowing this i swapped the infected hard drive into my other machine that had a flashable BIOS. the virus was then able to corrupt the BIOS on that machine and now the motherboard is toast. it will not post or even boot from the floppy as i tried to flash the BIOS with a new one.

regular formatting of the infected HD never got rid of it as after installing windows back in, my AVS detected the same virus again. only after low level formatting did it go away.

by simply having AVS on my machines, i could have saved myself a motherboard and all these hassles.