When I joined this forum, I made a post talking about a virus that a repair shop said physically ruined the drive, in that they formatted it and the drive would still not work. Afterwards, I gave the drive to my friend who knows a bit more about computers than me. Months went buy and I didn’t hear from him until a few days ago. He said with some recovery tool, he was able to access the drive. Hmm. He said they hadn’t fully formatted or something because there was a 50mb partition left. When he tried to format it, the drive decided to stop working. I decided to give my drive to my computer teacher so she can look at it. Do any of you have any ideas?
Sorry, but the repair shop is dead wrong. There’s no way a Virus can “physically” damage a hard drive. It can erase the drive, or make the drive so it can’t boot but not harm the drive itself.
The drive may have been going bad and just finally died. There are tools that can tell you if the drive is going bad and repair bad sectors. The one I use is called SpinRite, It’s not free ( $89 US) but it works wonders.
There are few viruses, usually during the DOS days, that can physically damage a drive. They can try to make the HD spin in reverse.