possible virus on my computer

[jester8562]

I think I may have a virus on my computer. I believe it is in something that I downloaded. I download to a different drive from my system hard drive. My computer would suddenly crash without any warning or BSOD. I unplugged my other hard drives and only connected my system hard drive and my system is stable. This leads me to believe that it is on the hard drive that i use to download things. I tried running a virus scan on the drive but that also caused the system to crash. If I left the drive connected, but did not access my downloaded files, it was fine, but when I tried running a virus scan on the folder, my computer crashed.

Does anyone know of a way I can go in and delete the files without having to reformat my hard drive. I have other files on that hard drive that I don't want to lose. I'm not sure which file specifically has the problem. I am hesitant to connect my hard drive because I think that the computer suddenly powering off is bad for the hardware.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

[pam123]

Run chkdsk on that hard drive and and you should download the drive manufacturer's diagnostic.

It could certainly be a virus but it could also be a drive that developed bad sectors so lets look for that first.

If both of those are clear then we'll try cleaning the hard drive but it's likely that we'll only be able to get some of the files off of the drive and you'll still have to format.

[rjfvillarosa]

Elaborating a little on what Pam has said. Download the diagnostic utility from the website of the manufacturer of the suspect harddrive, now create a bootable disk using your CD burner. Remove your system drive and reconnect the drive giving trouble. Now run the drive manufacturers diagnostic utility on the drive, the diagnostic utility runs in a DOS like environment and doesn't require your system drive to run, you boot your computer up with the harddrive diagnostic disk in the CD drawer and the boot order set to boot from the CD first.
This will allow you to see if the drive is failing without the possible risk of the virus (if there is one present) contaminating your system drive.

[jester8562]

I ran SeaTools for Windows and it failed the Short Drive Self Test. I think this means that it has a bad sector. When I try to run error check on the drive, my computer crashes. It also crashes when I try to copy data off of the drive. I would like to get the data off of the drive, but if its is not possible, its not the end of the world. It is a Seagate 500 GB SATA Internal Drive, model #ST3500630AS. Any thoughts on how I'd go about getting data off of the drive and then fixing it?
Thanks.

Edit: I did find a virus on it, but got rid of it using spybot search and destroy, but the drive is still giving me problems. I followed these instructions (the first one):
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AmM0bSlnY0nCz7sGDgtarD4azKIX;_ylv=3?qid=20081024142028AA4UEe7

[pam123]

Since it's a backup drive you're in luck ( As in luck as you can be with something like this.) since you can put the recovery software on your 'C' drive and use it transfer data to a new drive in your system.

Now give us your full specs.

[1life2live4]

you could try running Linux abontu , locate the files within Linux and move them away from the drive thats giving issues. If your n luck the bad sectors may only be read within windows. If not just fix the drive and run a data recovery on it. But then agian to fix the drie you need to run a new path of 1s and 0s so a recovery may not work. You need to play with it.





Good luck )

[glc]

You cannot "fix" drives that have bad sectors, but you should be able to get a warranty replacement. In order to be able to copy files off it if it's crashing the computer when you connect it internally, you can try using a USB adapter, and attempt to run chkdsk /r on it. Another option is run Spinrite option 2 on the drive, but that software costs $89.