Can a virus wreck a hard drive?

[dannyual767]

On Friday, I picked up a virus on my 2 yr old Toshiba Satellite (running XP.) The virus wiped out and deleted my wireless driver, reset the date to Jan 2005 and caused super slow boot up from stby. Only God knows what else it did. Since I couldn't restore my wireless driver, I decided to reformat the laptop. I've done it before to this Toshiba so I'm familiar with it.

Anyway, the Toshiba will no longer reformat. It says that there is an error in the reformat process. I tried loading the reformat disc several times and one time it said, "DLLs kernal. Contact your administrator." On another reformat attempt, it said that it couldn't open Windows.

I'm wondering if there is any way the virus could've ruined the HD. I've replaced laptop HDs before but I just don't want to waste my money if that isn't the problem.

[Eric1]

A virus will certainly corrupt the files on a hard drive. You need to wipe the drive, then reformat, then install windows.

Use this to wipe your drive. Darik's Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe and Data Clearing

[Lexluethar]

Have you tried a normal OS installation? Not one that is a recovery disk? Possibly the disk is scratched.

No, virus's can't physically harm the hard drive. You should be able to reformat the drive without issue assuming you have a good recovery disk / partition and a good hard drive.

Sounds to me like you have A)bad recovery parition B)bad recovery disk / scratched C)bad hard drive that just started crashing around the time you got this virus.

A good determination would be to try installing the OS from another CD / DVD.

[dannyual767]

Originally Posted by Lexluethar

Have you tried a normal OS installation? Not one that is a recovery disk? Possibly the disk is scratched.

No, virus's can't physically harm the hard drive. You should be able to reformat the drive without issue assuming you have a good recovery disk / partition and a good hard drive.

Sounds to me like you have A)bad recovery parition B)bad recovery disk / scratched C)bad hard drive that just started crashing around the time you got this virus.

A good determination would be to try installing the OS from another CD / DVD.

You are right, Lex. I don't have a "normal" XP disc but I did try several other "recovery" discs from other computers. I finally got one to work that came with my eMachines PC. I loaded up XP and all the other extra junk just fine. I'll be spending some time deleting all of the garbage that loaded up.

In any case, my HD is fine and I don't need to waste money replacing a perfectly good part. Thanks for the replies, guys!

Danny