Best post in this thread and it applies to a lot of other technical stuff that gets posted in ET. Whether or not its technically possible for a virus to damage a hard-drive, I've never heard about one in the wild and there is little motivation for creating it - a virus that kills the hard drive its running on has just ended its own existence.
avast removes viruses while I watch the scan. I also run it when I'm asleep, so the dream part is also true he has a boot sector virus and the remedy provided was correct. as with most posts on ET, it's the pearls in front of swines phenomenon.
even so, like jt and others noted, a boot sector virus does not damage the hardware of a hard drive nor does it affect any other component in the computer.
I saw an article in a scandal sheet, front page, titled "computer virus infects humans!" You can't be careful enough nowadays When I learned that Vista was blocking rootkits I upgraded. Those things are something else. I had a rootkit finding software on an XP machine, it just would find them and not do anything about them. I ran a scan, found a bunch of them, reran it, most were not showing. It seemed like they detected the scan and went away on their own or hid!! I am one of those techies mentioned. I started in computers in 1974 and never became a pro or quit, I do a lot of my hardware and security work though... I think the blacklisting firewall industry has to go away, whitelisting has to replace it, you allow only trusted url's with a whitelisting firewall. I do that with my trading computer. The surfing computer is an XP machine and I don't care much if it gets a virus, if I notice something funny I take it back to a restore point or format and reinstall the OS. The XP restore gave me problems once so I got Norton's restore, works fine... I forget to use it right after an OS install sometimes though, it has to be the first thing you do before you connect to the www....
Here's a few of the most likely possibilities: 1) The problem is heat and the other matters are coincidence. Keep the chassis earthed by switching off at power but leaving power cable connected. Open side and check fans and behind fans for dust, use a brush or vacuum pipe. 2) Faulty power supply. Replace with a cheap standard ATX PSU, 3-400W. 3) Is it really 'formatting' the disk? Many times manufacturers disks don't (in order to save your data) they just overwrite Windows which will leave viruses in place. You have to actually delete existing partitions and then format. 4) Is the disk split into two partitions? Or is there a second disk attached? Formatting the C: partition could leave the viruses intact on the second partition. Also manufacturers often set up hidden system partitions. You need a clean install that deletes all partitions and formats a new C: drive. 5) Very rarely I have had a virus that remains resident in memory even through the restart process while reinstalling. Instead of restarting immediately, shut down completely for a minute or two. 6) Google 'memtest86' on another computer, download and burn the boot cd iso and check the system and memory for faults by booting from this. It's very small and can be done in a few minutes. Red entries usually mean a faulty stick or two of memory. Errors should show up after 1 or 2 percent - no need to test for hours. 7) Try a long rather than a quick format when offered by Windows installer. If it hangs part way through or comes up with errors, it's the disk.
You are all mistaken. There are virus kits out there that can actually infect a HD on another machine, even if its in storage, turned off, and not networked to the infected machine. These are highly trained virus writers, working not in machine code, but in the actual microcode used by the chip itself. If you ever catch one of these, you'll probably have to destroy all your machines and buy new ones.
I got a trogan.dns.changer a couple of weeks ago. It fried my router and I to go get a new Lynksys. John
Why didn't you just reset it back to factory settings? The trojan doesn't change the firmware, just the router settings.