BleepingComputer.com: Blue Screen of Death (photo of error included)

Hello everyone,

Here is the situation.

My uncle's PC caught a virus. He had Windows XP installed, and it worked good before the infection. Suddenly he can't load the PC anymore, it just goes to the Blue Screen. Eve if I chose Safe Mode, it would shows the BSOD or restart.

I had formatted the PC, and reinstalled Win XP. First try, same problem - BSOD.

I had re-formatted and re-installed XP at least 5 times, but the problem doesn't go away.

I had went to the debugging screen and done chkdsk /f, and all other options available (like fixing the boot sector, the master boot, etc), and still get the error.

I am starting to think that this could be a hardware issue, but since the computer was working well before the infection, I'm kind of dumbfounded as to how a virus could mess with the hardware.

Here's the pic I took of the BSOD:


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Please help!

This post has been edited by luizgot: 15 November 2010 - 07:28 AM

Hi Luiz, is this a Dell machine? Here's what I read on a different forum about it:

Quote

This is a possibility!

Another thing I am inclined to believe is that your BIOS settings might have changed.
You can try getting the BIOS back to defaults, and restart the machine, see if it works!
If not, you can also try booting into the BIOS and look for SATA operations, and switch setting to ATA, save and try again.

Ensure to make a note of all your BIOS settings, you might want to take pictures of these as you did with the BSOD, it's quick and simple.

Let me know how it went, there are other ways to approach this issue.

Regards

Moved from Am I Infected to XP.

What version of XP are you installing?

XP - No SATA Support

XP SP1 - Start of SATA Support

XP SP2 - SATA Support

XP SP3 - Shouldnt have any issues.

Sorry for long delay.

I have fixed the problem.

But...first I'll explain what I did.

I tried to change the BIOS settings to ATA from SATA:


When restarting after changing to ATA, I saw it was taking a little longer to boot and showed some lines I hadn't seen before, so I paused and see this:



You can see it says "Drive: fail Return code 7"....so it IS a failed/corrupted hard drive.

So this didn't fix it and now I knew it was a failed hard drive.

So then I decided to format the hard disk again. But this time I partitioned the hard drive into a 10 GB partition, and the rest (475gb) I left unformatted.

This fixed it. Obviously the 10gb I formatted didn't have a corrupted/failed sector in it, so Win loaded properly.

I then formatted the rest of the hard drive into two partitions, so I have three partitions in all now.

I still need your help. How do I scan and fix the corrupted parts of the hard drive that is in the other two partitions? Obviously it's still there.

This post has been edited by luizgot: 18 November 2010 - 06:41 PM

Replace the drive all together.

luizgot, on 18 November 2010 - 06:40 PM, said:

Replacing the troublesome HDD with a new one is the preferred option.

However, since you asked the question .... there are a couple of suggestions I could make that may enable you to "work around" the issue.

Not my prefered method, but in your current situation ...
Try this ...
Use the Windows Error checking utility (Check Disk), with the options to scan the disk surface for errors, and attempt recovery of data and repair the disk.[list]
[*]Open "My Computer"
[*]Right-click on the drive that you wish to check > Properties > Tools > and in the "Error checking" section, click on "Check now".
[*]Place a tick in both boxes > Start.
[*]Allow the scan to run un-interrupted, until finished.
[*]If any errors were found, it may be prudent to repeat Check Disk.

Edit: Note that checking C drive/your system drive, is a little different, in that you must schedule to restart your computer and allow it to run the error check upon restart.
-------------------------------------------------------


My preferred method of attempting to salvage the HDD ...

Seeing the "failed HDD" error message, I would immediately download the appropriate diagnostic utility and run that. Your HDD is manufactured by Western Digital, so go to their website and download their diagnostic tool, which will provide you with an .ISO image file, which you can burn to CD (using ImgBurn, if you don't have a suitable burning program ... choose to "Write image to disk"). That will give you a bootable CD. Boot the system with the CD and run the short test: If that passes, run the long/extended test. If the test fails, I strongly recommend that you replace the HDD with a new one.

If it passed the above diagnostic test, well and good: I would proceed with the next step.

Download dban and burn the .ISO image to CD as above. Boot with the CD and run dban to wipe the HDD. If that is successful, there is hope for the HDD. Then proceed with a partition/full format/install of XP all over again.

Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities
http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

This post has been edited by AustrAlien: 18 November 2010 - 11:44 PM

thanks for advice Alien!!!
great avatar btw.