Worm crashed my hard drive?

Viruses and worms
1

ok, I could use some quick help on this.
I use Avast! Home on both my PCs, I use Ad-Aware SE for my spyware removal on both PCs

My fiance downloaded 3 programs last night for some supposed beta testing on them. Privacy Butler 1.0, Password Safehouse, and Pop-Up Defender 2004.

Soon after downloading and installing them her computer started slowing down and acting as if it was not entirely under her control. She decided to terminate the programs and tried to delete them using the windows add/remove programs menu. It opened up but showed no programs whatsoever, She did this 3 times and still nothing. So she tried using the windows explorer search tool and it found nothing as well, it froze up everytime she tried searching.

She assumed maybe it was a spyware program messing with the computer and ran Ad-Aware on it, but it got about 2/3 of the way through the hard drive and froze. We turned off the computer and now it won’t boot up again. When we try booting it up without a system disk it says that it can not start windows because \system32\ntoskrnl.exe is either missing or corrupt.

So I use my windows system disk to boot up and it tells me windows is not installed on my machine. I can’t try to reinstall that file because the repair aspect of the boot disk can’t detect any info on the hard drive. When I try to dheck and repair the hard drive it scans up to 33% of my drive then stops saying that it has problems that are unrecoverable.

I don’t suspect hardware failure because of the proximity and type of problems i had to the programs that were downloaded, from a source I know nothing about.

however, without knowing any way to get into my computer I know of no way to clean it or move out my personal files.
So I’m asking, has anyone heard of anything that can do this and get past Avast to do it? I’ve heard of bugs that can attack the fat tables and ‘hide’ data…is there any way that’s what’s happening here and that by mounting the drive on a different computer as a slave I could fix it?

Sorry for the long post and thanks for any timely responses to this.

2

Can you overinstall XP?

Do you use FAT32 or NTFS for file system?

This will be very good if you could do so but… remember, the master drive could be contaminated as well :-[ :-\

3

I honestly don’t know whether I use FAT32 or NTFS, I used whichever is the default when installing Windows XP

4

could you just reformat the hard drive ,then run your restore disk?

5

Of Course I could, but I don’t want to, I have a lot of precious data on my computer that I want to save in any way I can. Reformatting will get rid of the virus, but it will also get rid of my data and it is not backed up anywhere.

6

i know that windows xp has the option to just repair your system,not reinstall. i know when i had a problem and ran restore disk it gave the two choices

7

well when I put in my system disk it only gives me the options to either setup windows or go to the recovery center, which is entirely DOS. I’m not the best at working in DOS, but from what I can gather, the system disk can tell how big my hard drive is, but can only access data in 33% of it, and it cannot detect any trace of windows. The .exe file it tells me is missing, ntoskrnl.exe is short for NT OS Kernel, which I would assume is the main .exe file that windows runs from. So either a worm destroyed or blocked half my hard drive, a worm caused my hardware to fail, or it is somehow ‘hiding’ 67% of my hard drive from any kind of access.

8

Use program HDDlife and tell us the health/performance status of her harddrive.

9

well the problem is that unless it is a program that can run off of a boot disk and that I can download and burn onto a CD I can’t use any programs, because I can’t access the computer and have no way to run a system without access to the OS.
If that is a program I can use from a boot disk, I’ll check it out.