External Harddrive virus?

themucaro

Hey guys,

At a complete loss here. The sister's harddrive has gone belly up on her, she has most of the stuff backed up but has a lot of college notes on it that she needs off it. I was going to hand it into a techie shop here in Limerick but said I'd post here first and see what advice I could get (apologies if I'm in the wrong forum, think I had it in the wrong one earlier).

I'll just copy and paste what she wrote in her own words....

"The hard-drive...basically it's always been a bit dodgy, for the last year anyway. It overheats or something, if I use it for an hour or so it'll stop working and an error message comes up on the computer. Then it said one of the folders (TV series) was corrupted, and I couldn't even open the folder, and then one day it just wouldn't work on the computer, caused the computer to shut down and that blue error screen to come up, not just on my computer, tested it on another one. All I really want off it are my photos and my college stuff, I can get the music and films etc back in the future".

From what she was saying, as soon as she plugs it into a desktop or laptop, it causes the computer to crash. Is there anyway of retrieving any of the data on it or do you reckon it'll have to be formatted?

Any help at all is much appreciated!

STBR

themucaro wrote: »

Hey guys,

At a complete loss here. The sister's harddrive has gone belly up on her, she has most of the stuff backed up but has a lot of college notes on it that she needs off it. I was going to hand it into a techie shop here in Limerick but said I'd post here first and see what advice I could get (apologies if I'm in the wrong forum, think I had it in the wrong one earlier).

I'll just copy and paste what she wrote in her own words....

"The hard-drive...basically it's always been a bit dodgy, for the last year anyway. It overheats or something, if I use it for an hour or so it'll stop working and an error message comes up on the computer. Then it said one of the folders (TV series) was corrupted, and I couldn't even open the folder, and then one day it just wouldn't work on the computer, caused the computer to shut down and that blue error screen to come up, not just on my computer, tested it on another one. All I really want off it are my photos and my college stuff, I can get the music and films etc back in the future".

From what she was saying, as soon as she plugs it into a desktop or laptop, it causes the computer to crash. Is there anyway of retrieving any of the data on it or do you reckon it'll have to be formatted?

Any help at all is much appreciated!

First off just make sure you tell her that in the future if she's downloading TV shows/films [I'm guessing pirated] make sure she doesn't go downloading .exe files that are clearly viruses.

My cousin always does this; thinks she's downloading music tracks and they couldn't be more obvious.

But yeah my guess would be a virus/spyware.

Scan it with a few anti-viruses and see what you get.

Ad-Aware, Spybot, AVG, etc.

TouchingVirus

Get a slax live CD and boot into Slax. Stick in the USB drive and give it a whirl...