virus help please

[jc01]

my grandpa must have gotten a virus on his pc because it has went haywire. here is what happend from what i understand.

he went to go do something from what i understand and and the computer said explorer has encounterd a problem and you need to restart the computer ( or something like that )

so my grandpa shut the computer down

then where i normilly says loading windows it said harddrive or disk error please insert boot media or select proper boot device... simililar to the error when you leave a floppy disk in the A:\ drive

so then i dertermin that it is most likely a virus so tried to dectet the data that he needed back with knoppix PHLAK and knoppix STD . . . none of which worked

so . . then i put his hd in my computer runnin as slave
it gets up to loading windows XP (my hdd loading it ) and then it does something i did not anticipate. it went into some kind of recovery console and and ran chdisk the it started spitthing out all this stuff about recovering orphaned files and deleating index entrys. (what exactley did it do?)

then it stopped and i finnaly got into my install of windows

so i went to my computer and to see if it picked up his hdd . . . and i can but there is 4 partitions on his disk G, H, I, J two of them spit out an error of "G:\ (or H:\) refers to a location that is unavailable. . . "

the other two partitions I and J i can see some files but not everyting

does any one know what happent to his hdd and/or how i can fix it

cheers adn thanks
jc01

[LooseChippings]

I doubt that this is a virus more likely a hard drive (HDD) problem.

Go to the HDD manufacturers site and download the HDD test application - all manufacturers seem to do them nowadays.

You copy the files to floppy and then boot the system from the floppy and check the integrity of the .

Good Luck.

[jc01]

ok i doubted you but you were correct

i downloaded seatools desktop (it is a segate drive) and ran it. it told me that i had all kinds of lost sectors i let it fix the lost sectors and bam seatools says that tere is no more problems . . . but there is. . .

windows xp pro keeps running chdisk at restart is this because the file structure is hosed or is it because the hdd is hosed all togeather

my second question is should i do a low level reformat , or would reinstalling windows xp (home) and reformatting the other partition be enough. . . i dont know that i should do the low level reformat becaus they have it split the drive into two partitions one 20 and one 40 GB

thanks
jc01

9/4/04 - u were right the hdd is hosedas it turns out thanks for ur help