This is because when a virus ruined my last computer, I took it in and the people who fixed it said the virus physically ruined the HDD. This seemed somewhat unbelievable and is debated online. They said it also could have been bad timing but my computer was barely over a year old. Also in an unrelated matter, since I went to YouTube today, my ZoneAlarm is flashing orange protected messages saying my computer was stopped from accessing another computer. It pops up every ten seconds or so. Do you know why? It’s done it at least ten times while I was typing this.
The virus isn’t a physical thing, so how can it do physical damage, I think they are taking you for ride.
Bad sectors on a hard drive are common and unrelated to virus activity, a virus might give your hard disk a workout if it were to create a lot of hard disk activity, modifying files, deleting, that would have to be enormous to cause it to fail and you would be well aware of this level of activity.
It could delete the master boot record or the file tables (the record of where files are on the HDD), this would render your HDD unbootable, etc. however, isn’t physical damage and when recovered the HDD would work.
We need a lot more information on the ZA message as without it we are totally in the dark.
Here’s the ZA more info page http://fwalerts.zonelabs.com/fwanalyze.jsp?record=ZLN10510169458886-1025/d4b4730123277c27a701ee9&tab=overview
Unfortunately that is of no use as it doesn’t say what is trying to get out from your system and not what it means by the message.
Personally I have little confidence in ZA, the free version even less as it is limited in outbound protection, there are better firewalls out there.
See http://www.matousec.com/projects/firewall-challenge/results.php.
According to this, Comodo firewall is the best free one, should I download this?
Comodo isn’t the best one (top of the free ones), any of the ones in the top section are fine, some don’t like Comodo the company and some don’t like the amount of pop-ups it throws up. I have never used Comodo, so I can’t really recommend it, I have been using Outpost Pro for many years, you have to make sure you don’t install the Anti-Virus element of Comodo as it comes as a Suite.
Read about Comodo:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=46737.0