Possible Hard Disk Failure or Virus ?

I'm working on a friend's PC trying to get the hard disk back up and running. A little bit of history:

First error : Floppy Diskette seek Failure - no floppy drive configured on the PC
Second error: BSOD with STOP 00000024

If I try to boot to SAFE mode it basically just loops back to reboot.

Attempted Vista Recovery booting to a CD but it does not show anything to recover.

I was able to boot the PC using Knoppix CD and retrieve the picture files that my friend wanted so bad, but I still don't know how to attempt to recover the hard disk (assuming that it is recoverable. I have had people mention the Ultimate Boot CD but I don't know how to use it and I'm afraid of running a test which may completely destroy the hard disk. Knowing that I was able to retrieve the files using Knoppix tells me that the data is still out there - it's a problem with starting up.

I attempted to hook drive up to 2 different PCs (1 Windows 7 and 1 Windows XP). The Windows 7 system said disk needed to be formatted before use, and the XP system said the drive was 'corrupt and unreadable.

This is a follow up to a previous post I had for this problem. Not sure if I should have opened this new post or continued in the older one (not sure if it was closed or not).

I'm not sure if this could be a virus infection of some sort messing up the boot or truly a hardware problem. If this needs to be moved to the appropriate forum, please do so.

Sounds like a possible damaged hard drive. find out what brand hard drive it is and download and make a diagnostic CD from the manufacturer. (here are links to each manufacturer)

Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools

If anyone if viewing this thread, I downloaded the SeaTools for Seagate drives, and it shows the tests completing without error. Safe to assume the actual hard drive is OK ?

I suppose the disk would be fine if they say so, but it's Seagate's program for Seagate's drive... Manufacturers don't like admitting their product is faulty.

If at all possible, run chkdsk /r
From what you've said, this seems unlikely.

If you have a floppy drive...
Download: http://www.geekswhoknow.com/files/ntfsinst.exe
Run and follow the given instructions.

If all fails...
Download DBAN: http://www.dban.org/ppc.html
or another alternative for secure file deletion/formatting the drive.

Reinstall the OS!

If the drive is made by Seagate, the diagnostic results should be valid.

But...the partition structure (not the drive itself) could be messed up...per the results viewed from XP and Win 7 you reported.

In which case...formatting the drive after deleting the current partition...should restore functionality.

Louis

Is there any other way to recover ? I've run chkdsk /f to fix a ton of bad:

Security description verification completed
23507 data files processed
CHKDSK is verifying Usn JHournal
100 percent complete. ,36188160 of 36190712 USN bytes processed.
Repairing Usn Journal file record segment
Usn Journal verification completed
Correcting errors in the Master File Table ,MFT. mirror
Correcting Errors in the master file table's ,MFT. BITMAP attribute
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap
Windows has made corrections to the file system



145713151 KB Total disk space
62343776 KB in 132278 files
85124 KB in 23509 indexes
0 KB in bad sectors
267287 KB in use byt the system
65536 KB occupied by the log file
83016964 KB available on disk

4096 bytes in each allocation unit
36428287 total allocation units on disk
20754241 allocation units available on disk

Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50


I attempt to boot and just get a blank screen. Running start up Repair from the Vista repair disk tells me everything is OK, but obviously it's not.