Question About My Old Hard Drive

[BRANDONN2008]

About a year and a half ago, my computer became infected with a virus that made it completely freeze up. After taking it to a repair place, they told me they tried formatting it but the drive was dead. People I've told this to have been skeptical that a virus destroyed a hard drive. Anyway, I gave it to my friend a few months ago, and he said he could access it but when he tried formatting, it had some problems. I took it and gave it to one of my college teachers, who said it might still work and I should try formatting it again. I was wondering if installing this hard drive into my system could result in my good hard drive becoming infected.

If it would be okay, would I just connect it to my motherboard, boot from my working hard drive, and try formatting?

[DavidR]

Formatting it is a secondary action as there used to be a preparation stage called FDisk (older OSes) on brand new HDDs which is a partitioning the HDD done before formatting a drive.

I haven't done this in many many years, so if someone knows how to do this then after FDisk you may find that it can be formatted.

So it might be worth trying FDisk to completely clear the HDD and repartition it before trying a format, check this link, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255867

[BRANDONN2008]

That sounds like a good idea. And is it safe to allow the drive to be connected to my computer, or can the infection jump to my good drive when I try to format it?

[DavidR]

Slaving a drive is relatively risk free as any malware on it would be inert as there is no reference to the malware in the registry of the system it is placed as a slave drive, not to mention in its current condition the drive is stuffed (sorry about getting technical).

[BRANDONN2008]

I think I'll give it a try now. Thank you.

[DavidR]

You're welcome, good luck.

That's me for the night, 4am here.

[BRANDONN2008]

Well that was a waste of time. I connect the drive, and started the computer. It takes an incredibly long time just to POST. It gets to where it says Windows and should have the little loading bar underneath. No loading bar, so I wait, and nothing. I restart it, and after canceling a start-up repair, I log in, and there is no other drive found anywhere, so I guess it is so far gone, my computer can't even recognize it. Oh well.

[Asyn]

Well that was a waste of time. I connect the drive, and started the computer. It takes an incredibly long time just to POST. It gets to where it says Windows and should have the little loading bar underneath. No loading bar, so I wait, and nothing. I restart it, and after canceling a start-up repair, I log in, and there is no other drive found anywhere, so I guess it is so far gone, my computer can't even recognize it. Oh well.

Could be you have to tell your BIOS, that you have added a new drive, first.
asyn

[Hermite15]

  I've heard this before, people  assuming that viruses could a kill hard drive this is ridiculous. If your drive fails, it's hardware related. I doubt any virus could affect the firmware or the cache (there has been rumors though )

[Asyn]

I've heard this before, people  assuming that viruses could a kill hard drive this is ridiculous. If your drive fails, it's hardware related. I doubt any virus could affect the firmware or the cache (there has been rumors though )

You're right. It could only destroy the data on the hd, even could make it unreadable.
But nothing that couldn't be fixed with the fdisk/format commands.
asyn