LordFett Posted September 11, 2009 Share Posted September 11, 2009 I was working on a friend's laptop that was infested with trojans. I have everything under control and was running some last check scans when I got a BSoD. When I rebooted the laptop the hard drive was making it's final cry before death and the computer can't find it.Some of the infestations she had were: Fraud.SafetyCenter, Fraud.Win-Antivrius, Fraud.WindowsPolicePro, Fraud.XPAntivirus, Win32.TDSS.ntf, Win32.ZBotIs it possible that these malwares caused the death of the hard drive? It is a 5 year old hitatchi travelstar. Or was it probably just it's time to go? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davismccarn Posted September 12, 2009 Share Posted September 12, 2009 No, there are no trojans/malware that I know of which can cause hardware failure.On the other hand; numerous Trojans will eat your permissions (which may look like a failed drive) when you hurt them badly.If the system says no hard drive, that's hardware. If it won't let you login, it may be damage caused by the malware. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LordFett Posted September 15, 2009 Author Share Posted September 15, 2009 It says no hard drive after BIOS goes through it's checks. And as soon as I power it on it sounds like something is wrong with it for sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davismccarn Posted September 15, 2009 Share Posted September 15, 2009 The hardware failure; then, is unrelated to the viruses and the question is whether you need any data from the failed drive.If you don't, faster replacement drives can be surprisingly cheap and you then need the recovery CD/DVD's. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eksasol Posted September 16, 2009 Share Posted September 16, 2009 (edited) No, it simply dying because its a Hitachi. I speak from experience with Hitachi harddrives. Edited September 16, 2009 by eksasol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davismccarn Posted September 16, 2009 Share Posted September 16, 2009 Careful! Hard disk drive quality is a moving target. IBM sold its storage division to Hitachi (2002ish?) because of the infamous "deathstar" drives; but, Hitachi has since reengineered their drives and current models are very good. Seagate has been my vendor of choice; but, they currently have a defective series which came from a plant in Thailand and some are still on retailer's shelves. Western Digital has accounted for more than 50% of the data recoveries I have seen in the past 7 years, followed by Maxtor at about 20%.Right now, I would choose Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung, or Fujitsu with Hitachi edging out Seagate because of their handling of the defective drives.P.S. I have been doing data recovery since 1979 (on cassettes and floppies!) and have seen well over 20,000 failed drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LordFett Posted September 17, 2009 Author Share Posted September 17, 2009 Any recomendations for an etailer that still sells 2.5" IDE? I usually use newegg and tigerdirect, but they both seem to only have SATA in 2.5". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davismccarn Posted September 17, 2009 Share Posted September 17, 2009 I searched Google shopping for "Seagate Momentus ata 120GB" and got $48 at ZipzoomFly: http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=s...title#scoring=pSome older systems will hate a drive larger than 128GB; but, if you want to change the size and see what pops up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
puntoMX Posted September 17, 2009 Share Posted September 17, 2009 Careful! Hard disk drive quality is a moving target. IBM sold its storage division to Hitachi (2002ish?) because of the infamous "deathstar" drives; but, Hitachi has since reengineered their drives and current models are very good.I agree there, they might be not the fastest but they are so well made these days. I use them for my systems and also less to none returns from customers. If I can't get Hitachi I go with the Seagate 7200.12 drives or WD.I don't know about the heads but most are made by TDK? Just wondering... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pointertovoid Posted September 21, 2009 Share Posted September 21, 2009 (edited) My experience with Hitachi drives is excellent, as well as with Excelstor (technology licensed from Hitachi) - though I don't have an experience of 20,000 dead drives... And for Laptops, Hitachi have (among the) fastest drives. Prefer a 7200rpm, it makes a huge difference. And as big a capacity per platter as possible.Find as many P-Ata drives as you want at eBay.Did you test your drive with the appropriate software? Drive Fitness Test is there:http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htmjust in case a trojan has overwritten your hdd's boot sector.-----Malware creating hardware failure: maybe...Because many firmwares can be flashed from within Windows, which I don't see as an improvement because of this security concern.Also, settings of chips can be changed from within Windows, as is done for Cpu clock for instance. Changing the temperature alarm as well as the frequency or the supply voltages could be harmful. Zap the Ram for instance. As far as I know, any adjustment done by the Bios can be done from within Windows as well; it may need an account with administrator rights, or may need to install some driver or service.Such malware would need to be sophisticated and maybe specialized on some hardware, but sophisticated malware already exists. Edited September 21, 2009 by pointertovoid Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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