Avast zapped a hard disk ?

[suffolksilver]

I installed Avast 4 Free on a 6 year old Win ME machine.  It is a weedy thing with only 48Mb RAM.  I was pleased to see that it found 4 nasties, one of which was deleted but the other were to be deleted at reboot. When I did so the hard disk disappeared from view and has not been seen since on that or any other machine.  It is merely not recognised, cannot be restored, Fdisked, Formatted or anything.  Fortunately it was not used for anything serious and I have replaced it.  I am very fond of Avast and recommend to everyone but could it (or the viruses) have done something so awful ?

[DavidR]

I strongly doubt it, avast only deletes what you have chosen to be deleted and a virus could mess with your files/folders and even FAT (file allocation table) or boot sector, but not what you are describing.

This sounds more like a hardware failure (which a virus can't do) for it not to be recognised even on another system.

If this system hasn't been active or to be stored inactive for a very long time if the conditions of storage weren't ideal it could contribute to a failure and I believe this failure would happen soon after reactivation.

Is it even recognised at boot ?

[diligentinquirer]

I would double check with DavidR on this first, but you could (I think) do a regedit to restore the earlier registry that might clear your problem up, if it is a problem for you now. Just a thought, but if you want to, do ask DavidR first.

Diligent

[DavidR]

A hard disk that isn't recognised at boot wont have any association with the registry as it isn't loaded. This is likely to be a much lower level bios or hardware issue I believe, but if it isn't recognised at boot or on another system as a slave drive, registry won't be involved. We need suffolksilver's answers to confirm if it is recognised at boot or in another system.