Computer virus that damages hard drive

Thankyou for any help you can give me, this has been a real pain!!!!! I had a virus on my computer similar to the one mentioned.

It told me my disc was damaged and the usual give us your Card details and we will fix it! The screen was black and very little worked it seemed all was lost. Then I remembered the computer was split into family names I went on my sons name and Started Ad aware and Windows Defender they both found malaware and deleted it a restart was required. On restarting I went for a systems restore to a previous week. It worked wonders the Virus has now gone and all things on my own name are working. Lucky I had two users on the machine or it would have been hard work knowing what to do.

I received an E mail from a known sender which contained a link to what I thought was a website to look a wedding pictures. I have access to internet explorer,but I lost all of other programs and my hard drive is damaged. The computer is about 6 years old. Can a hard drive be fixed or is some damage beyound repair? How did this happen? How did I get a fake e mail? I had no idea it was not from the known sender. However Yahoo filters them into the spam folder where I can look at them without opening them.

Better safe than sorry. Only download from trusted sources and even then scan it with a good virus scanner. I use Norton Insight! I think I have a bad virus. A few days ago I was at Facebook. Yesterday my hard drive started failing and it would not allow me to reinstall Win XP and gave a message that it was unable to format my hard drive. I have two copies of Win XP and neither worked.

A failure may be imminent. I have read that I should be using a password on my hard drive and will do that in the future. Computer viruses are software code designed to spread to computer files and other computers, delete files, and cause other problems with the data on the computer. That being said, it is possible that a virus could corrupt data on the computer including the software drivers that are used to allow your hardware devices to communicate with the computer.

If this were to occur it may prevent the device from working but would not physically damage the hardware. You may also want to try to reinstall the drivers. Hi Leo, I recieved a terrible virus recently and after I used the recovery disc to try to get a complete fresh start with the computer it will only work for a few hours and crash again.

Any suggestions? Thanks, Erin. Hi, I am just curious but is it possible for viruses to mess with temperature regulation and causes CPUs to overheat and lead to physical damage? You could always try rebooting your computer into safe mode, then running your AV. I rebuilt my computer twice this month — 2 major viruses — last one was in Google Earth file Giga- yes Gigabite.

I finally maneuvered this one out after many days of hard work. Retrieving my files from my infected backupdrive virus took up space of all the Gigabite in the backup drive , I am having some kind of hanging problems again. Are data files also infected???

I am a nervous wreck now and feel like throwing all my files out. Each re-install took me several days working several hours a day. Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam.

All comments containing links and certain keywords will be moderated before publication. I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read. Search Ask Leo! Do this Subscribe to Confident Computing! I'll see you there! Oh, and I have to mention StuxNet, the virus that targetted computers controlling uranium enrichment equipment in Iran. In this case, the virus tried to affect the functioning of centrifuges and other equipment being controlled by the infected computers.

There was no physical damage to the computers, and it's not even clear if the centifuges were damaged. I am NOT trying to say that a computer virus can't damage files or destroy data. Of course it can.

And 15 or 20 years ago, old-school hackers might have been interested in doing that type of thing. But today, viruses are not created to destroy hardware or data. Viruses are created to steal data and money, to send spam, or to disrupt other users with denial of service attacks. And they're written so as to do their dirty work in secret. Virus creators WANT your hard drive to last a long time, so they can continue to use your computer to do their bidding.

Of course, computer components such as hard drives, motherboards, RAM, graphics cards and power supplies can wear out, or burn out. But those things are caused by defects in manufacturing, poor quality materials, overheating, or power surges. If a computer repair tech tells you a virus caused it, take your computer somewhere else. If you or your Cousin Vinny disagree with my opinion that a virus cannot physically damage a hard drive, please let me know!

And please, cite a credible source when you do. Your comments and questions are welcome below This article was posted by Bob Rankin on 29 Oct Posted by: AlanRC 29 Oct I totally agree that the viruses that we used to have back in the 90's are not a threat anymore, and no virus will physically destroy a hard drive.

I guess you could say that Ransomware, which encrypts an entire drive and asks for money to unlock it, will destroy data, unless you pay the ransom. Even then, it doesn't actually destroy the drive. I think you just have to re-initialize and re-format the drive to get rid of the virus.

Correct me if I'm wrong--I've never had to deal with ransomware personally. Posted by: GregC 29 Oct We had a power electricity failure while my Win 7 computer was defraging. Afterwards, I discovered that most sectors on the outer cylinder of HDD were damaged. It seems likely that the heads dropped onto the platter before these could come to rest in a safe location. I've said enough already, but you can get the idea. This HDD had less than 50 hours of operation.

I partitioned out the bad sectors at the start of the drive and the remainder is OK, but I still can't bring myself to significantly use it. Of course as a boot OS drive its useless. Posted by: Eli Marcus 29 Oct Thank you Bob for reinforcing this. Computer viruses are varied in nature. They have been around for many years and have been created for lots of different purposes, all of them malicious. Depending on the specific malware your computer may have been exposed to, the damage will be different.

One of the most alarming characteristics of a computer virus, and probably the reason for their success over the years, is the fact that malware is capable of reproducing itself and transmitting to other computer systems. Much like a human virus in real life, it is able to spread the infection on its own. In writing the virus, cyber criminals come up with a series of malicious code, which is meant to interrupt the normal functioning of your computer system.

By Dan Stone. Virus Disable, Not Break A computer virus is a self-replicating, malicious computer program classified as a type of malware.

Boot-Sector Viruses Boot-sector viruses are among the most damaging viruses and the most difficult to remove malware. Hypothetical Firmware Damage According to Computerworld, Western Digital Vice President Gary Meister said there is a way to build a virus that can damage a particular hard drive's firmware and disable the device.

Disk-Thrashing Aggravation There is a hypothetical way that a virus could contribute to an existing action that can break a hard drive. References Ask Leo! Related Articles.