Can a virus spread to an external hard drive

The last time he came was about a week before my contract ran out. I was having graphic problems, the screen was off set and it was only happening at start up.

I believed then and do now that it was a program I put on my computer was at fault. Neither fixed the problem and they said that I was on my own. They refused to fix what was wrong with my computer and when they did that, my monitor was shipped to me with scratches on it and the computer was coming up with Compaq on the screen, off set. I decided to just put the windows xp back on the computer to just get rid of all the problems.

When I tried to re-load my computer, I am now getting I can not get into the darn thing because I believe the motherboard is not the original one and the program will not load. A few things I want to address: when opening folders even the drive itself would the display thumbnails be executing any files in order to display their visual snippets?

Also as far as moving to a Unix OS to then inspect, especially on a system that contains your system as in either the LiveBoot or DualBoot option used on the same system holding your hard drive with your OS Windows or Mac or Linux , your risk of exposure is still present.

For instance, suppose you downloaded a Linux virus, a Mac virus, and a Windows virus. How would you know, anyway? My 5 year old desktop was infected with something a few months ago. My Avast said my pc was clean, but it keeps re-directing my browser to some ad site or to random search pages. Just want to get some pictures, some necessary files, and then wipe the old computer clean—along with the nasty little whatever it is—preferably without infecting my new one.

A great program for this is hijackthis, there are tons of forums out there that you can post your log and they will tell you what is causing you problems. It is also great for other malware affecting your system not only your browser as it scans your whole computer, the registry everything that starts up and all the components loading into your browser. My desktop computer was infected with a virus that cannot easily be removed. My question is: Will we be infected with the virus if we copy the photos and program files before running the Power Eraser Scan?

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It might have been able to erase data on a hard drive, or over-write the data on the BIOS, but that's not permanent physical damage. Oh, and I have to mention StuxNet, the virus that targetted computers controlling uranium enrichment equipment in Iran.

In this case, the virus tried to affect the functioning of centrifuges and other equipment being controlled by the infected computers. There was no physical damage to the computers, and it's not even clear if the centifuges were damaged.

I am NOT trying to say that a computer virus can't damage files or destroy data. Of course it can. And 15 or 20 years ago, old-school hackers might have been interested in doing that type of thing.

But today, viruses are not created to destroy hardware or data. Viruses are created to steal data and money, to send spam, or to disrupt other users with denial of service attacks. And they're written so as to do their dirty work in secret. Virus creators WANT your hard drive to last a long time, so they can continue to use your computer to do their bidding.

Of course, computer components such as hard drives, motherboards, RAM, graphics cards and power supplies can wear out, or burn out. But those things are caused by defects in manufacturing, poor quality materials, overheating, or power surges.

If a computer repair tech tells you a virus caused it, take your computer somewhere else. If you or your Cousin Vinny disagree with my opinion that a virus cannot physically damage a hard drive, please let me know!

And please, cite a credible source when you do. Your comments and questions are welcome below This article was posted by Bob Rankin on 29 Oct Posted by: AlanRC 29 Oct I totally agree that the viruses that we used to have back in the 90's are not a threat anymore, and no virus will physically destroy a hard drive. I guess you could say that Ransomware, which encrypts an entire drive and asks for money to unlock it, will destroy data, unless you pay the ransom. Even then, it doesn't actually destroy the drive.

I think you just have to re-initialize and re-format the drive to get rid of the virus. Correct me if I'm wrong--I've never had to deal with ransomware personally. Posted by: GregC 29 Oct We had a power electricity failure while my Win 7 computer was defraging. Afterwards, I discovered that most sectors on the outer cylinder of HDD were damaged.

It seems likely that the heads dropped onto the platter before these could come to rest in a safe location. I've said enough already, but you can get the idea. This HDD had less than 50 hours of operation. I partitioned out the bad sectors at the start of the drive and the remainder is OK, but I still can't bring myself to significantly use it. Of course as a boot OS drive its useless. Posted by: Eli Marcus 29 Oct Thank you Bob for reinforcing this. If only I knew then what I know today I was the victim of the deadly Chernobyl CIH virus back in the year Someone handed me a software CD with various software installation packages, and when I activated one of them, the whole system went dead in about 30 seconds.

I understood after a while that the BIOS on my PC was corrupted, but I don't recall now if I was prescient enough to salvage the hard drive and format it for later reuse.

Speaking of viruses, I have a small tip I can offer - A couple of years ago, I tried to clean up a virus riddled PC at work, and found that any software I tried to use was blocked by the viruses, and access to the internet was limited basically to news sites, but I couldn't access any antivirus or anti malware sites It dawned on me to try using some portable apps I had on a USB drive, and lo and behold, it worked!

I had to use a few of them one after the other to get a thorough cleaning, but the viruses on the PC apparently didn't identify the portable apps, so it worked quite nicely! Posted by: bobd 29 Oct When I wrote in a Microsoft forum that my attempt to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 bricked my motherboard, the expected cadre of ignorati claimed that was impossible.

I've never seen that. The message in the message window said "The drive failed to perform the confidence test properly". I tried 4 times, each time it giving that error code and the message about the IRQ. I read the post in the thread you linked to for me, and I'm getting the impression I'll be replacing my hard drive That will overwrite the master boot record with legitimate code, in case malware has been installed there.

Yes, you are correct. Error Code 0F indicates an issue with the hard drive and would require replacement. As you've mentioned that the system is 3 years old, I believe that it would not under warranty. If it is, then let me know. If the warranty has expired, then you may get in touch with our Out of Warranty dept.

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