Can This Happen?

Yes, a virus can kill a hard drive, and many other things. If he can load the OS on the HDD, it most likely is still okay. Unfortunately, of the possibilities is the corruption of the system (motherboard) BIOS - which can usually be reloaded (re-flashed).

Before he gets to wild (probably too late) - he should look and see if there are any XP issues causing the restart upon booting. If that gets him nowhere, start at A and move to Z.

If you can get a list of parts and pieces (manufacturer and model numbers) that he has in his machine, we will attempt to help. (Unless he has a pre-packaged machine like Sony, Dell, etc.)

 

Just go get another drive and be done with it. They are so cheap now. And then he will have TWO drives. One dead, adn one alive. If the ead one revives eh will have 2 good drives. One fo ruseage and one with a ghose image onit. Then eh will never again be without a working machine.

 

Try a secure data removal program to totally erase the drive then reinstall.

 

Glad to hear that he is running.

He is still not out of the woods yet - he NEEDS to find out what the ACTUAL cause was. If it was virus related, he may need to look at his software - and maybe, just maybe the drive was on its leg anyway.

 

Pro you might want to run software from cd first as if its holding in memory It can take out the new drive if its a goodie(virus)