Date: 03/08/06 (Computer Help)    Keywords: virus, linux

I really dislike asking for help, but I'm at a complete loss at what to do. My computer is a home-made variety, Intel motherboard+chip, Samsung hardrives. OS is Windows XP, altough I don't think that matters with what's going on. I have an anti-virus - Norton - but again, I don't think that's made much of a difference in the past week and a half.

First off, yes, I know about cable placement and setting jumpers.

So. I had two hardrives, an 80 gig and a 40 gig. The 40 was the master with the OS and the 80 was the slave. About a week ago I decided I didn't like this setup and wanted to put the newer hardrive as the master and the older as a slaved backup. Soooo, I move files around, remove all the partitions from my 80, repartition, format, install, and move all my files back over to my 80. Get the 40 ready for being formatted, reboot, and BAM - there's a black screen reading "Disk Read Error."

I tried everything I knew. Put the 40 in charge again and tried to read the 80 from Windows XP. If I clicked on it I got either "F: or whatever path it was is an invalid parameter", "F: is not formatted" and "Cyclic redundancy error." Checking the properties of the 80 gig showed that it was reading the drive as having 0 space used, 0 space free, with a file structure of RAW. Since this was above me, I took it to a friend's house who is more computer-savvy.

We tried it on a Linux box. It could find the drive but could not read. Put it in their Windows box. Found the drive, could not read. Ran chkdsk on it (multiple times) and it just came up with a bunch of bad sectors and failed after the first step. Right now the busted 80 is still at their house, my friend is still trying to get any data off it. I've lost hope - we believe the physical disk was scratched.

Now, this wouldn't bother me too badly (this stuff happens after all..) except I bought a new hardrive yesterday. 80 gig. Stuffed it in as master. Installed Windows. This morning, went to access my 40 gig - the good drive that has lasted me for a long time - and BAM. Not formatted/other error messages. RAW file structure. Boot it up as master - Disk Read Error. Swapped out the ribbon cable for a new one - nothing changed.

Right now I have the 40 unplugged and am just sitting here sweating, waiting for my black hole inside my box to devourer my brand-new 80. I've had this computer for about a year and a half now, some parts longer than that (the 40 I've had for nearly three years and the old 80 for about a year) and I've never had a problem like this. I don't care about recovering my hardrives anymore. I just want to figure out what is wrong with this thing, why it's destroying hardrives, and what needs to be replaced/done to keep my system from completely melting down. Cause I'm really scared right now.

And I'm a college student putting myself through school. I can't afford these sorts of problems right now.

crossposted to some places cause I'm desperate and scared

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/597464.html