A virus can't make your computer physically fail to boot, can it?

Factual Questions
1

No signs of a virus invasion on the family laptop (running Win XP) – my daughter was on a school-sanctioned math website that she had used safely many times in the past. The website was undergoing announced maintenance, so this time my daughter’s log-in attempt failed.

The laptop was frozen on this site, so I made a few attempts to close the browser. After maybe 3 minutes (with me pressing the X and pushing CTRL-ALT-DLT frequently), the browser finally closed. The laptop was still hung up, so I pressed and held down the Power button, as I had done jillions of times.

Only this time, when I pressed the Power button again to reboot, the hard drive spun for maybe a 3-count and just went quiet. I could see the “TOSHIBA” logo on the screen, as normal, but after that the screen went black. Couldn’t see my desktop image, icons, or anything.

I tried booting in Safe Mode next, pressing F8 when the “TOSHIBA” screen appeared. I got to the Safe Mode menu that lets me choose “type of Safe Mode” (With Networking, Last Good Config, etc.). I chose the first option (Safe Mode, No Networking), and watched the usual parade of file names cacade down a black screen. Usually, the screen would fill with maybe 25-30 file names – this time, maybe 10-12 file names listed out, then the screen froze and the hard drive quit spinning.

I have tried to reboot in Safe Mode several times since then … but everytime, the hard drive quits spinning too soon. It spins long enough to get the “TOSHIBA” screen up, but then just goes black.

I have checked overheating, and have checked to make sure it wasn’t a dead battery. Negative on the battery: laptop has been/is running from the wall socket, and it wasn’t unplugged … though the “power box” on the plug cord is not as warm as I’d expect it to be.

Laptop is about 5 or 6 years old. The thing that’s got me the most concerned is that the hard drive is not spinining for more than a few seconds on each reboot attempt. Does this sound like a for-certain fried hard drive, or is there a pro-level fix out there that I can try at home? TIA for any advice.

2

Yup, sounds like a dead hard drive - it’s managing to work briefly sometimes (which is how you’re getting to the Safe Mode option) but the drive is pretty much toast. Try booting from a livecd - you might be able to get the hard drive working long enough to back up a few files to a memory stick or something.

3

Thankfully, don’t need any files at all from the laptop – if sacrificing the data can lead to a fix, I’ll do it in a second.

Unfortunately, the laptop is second-hand, and we don’t have any of the original software (no Win XP disk).

4

Just out of curiosity… does it boot to safe mode command prompt?

5

It can’t get to the “Safe Mode Choices” screen anymore. It worked that one time, but not in the 5 or 6 attempts since then.

6

You can download and burn a live CD/USB stick of Ubuntu here. That will at least help you narrow down the problem to the hard drive.

7

Thanks, treis. What are the instructions from there? How would I test the integrity of the hard drive?

8

This dies sound like a dead or dying HDD.

If you have a XP CD, you can boot off that and go to a command prompt recovery console. From there you can run chkdsk against the C: drive.

9

A virus can cause your computer to stop booting, but usually when that happens the symptoms are 100 percent repeatable. You won’t sometimes get to the safe mode screen and sometimes not. You either will get there or you won’t and that’s it.

Your symptoms are definitely typical of a hard drive failure.

If you remove the hard drive and put it in a ziplock bag and stick it in the freezer for a bit, when you take it out and stick it back in the computer it might work long enough for you to get data off of it. It’s not guaranteed though. If you don’t need the data off of the drive, it’s probably not worth bothering with.

10

There’s no instructions from there. If you can boot from the CD/USB stick then everything on the computer is working except for the HDD. If everything else works, then it must be the HDD causing the problems. There is something physically wrong with the drive or Windows is corrupted. With no windows disks you’re in the same position either way.

Linux does have fsck which is similar to windows chkdsk, but I am not sure how to use it while booting from the CD.

11

[quote=“bordelond, post:7, topic:550555”]

Once you’ve booted Ubuntu from the CD or USB drive, go to system/administration and run Disk Utility. You will see a list of all your drives. Click on the suspect drive and you will have various diagnostic options: check filesystem, run benchmark, etc.

12

Answering the question in your headline without checking my details:
As I remember CIH virus activated on 26th April (date of Chernobyl disaster) was the first virus which reprogrammed FLASH ROMs where the BIOS of your computer is located. After contamination you had to reprogram the chip in another computer to make it boot again.

13

^ I was under the impression that this was not possible with a modern OS, and that this is why BIOS flashing programs come with boot disks. I’d at least hope it’s impossible without administrator access.

Of course, it could just be that such a virus is not going to propagate itself very well with a dead computer, thus not being very viable in the wild. The worst malware now tries to be as undetectable as possible.

I do remember that some person created a firmware bricker virus for the DS, and was essentially banned from the homebrew community, which is a pretty mean feat as there is no central location. And the guy was just doing it as a proof of concept.

OP: You’ve already gotten what you need above, at least until you need more help, like maybe in buying a new hard drive. That’s why I went ahead and embraced this tangent.

14

Thanks, BigT. I got an interesting minority opinion from another board … was wondering if you could weigh in on whether these other guys are making sense:

…

To maybe add a little more relevant info to what I posted in the OP:

a) Upon any and all attempted reboots, it can ALWAYS get to the manufacture’s splash screen (a big red “TOSHIBA” appears), which is always the first thing that appears upon bootup.

b) It can only get to the Safe Mode splash screen (the one that lets you choose “type” of Safe Mode") if the laptop’s been powered down for an hour or so. If I repeatedly try to keep rebooting, every attempt after the first will fail to get even as far as the Safe Mode splash screen.

15

Whether the hard drive is dead-dead, only partly-dead, or fine but something else is broken, the next step is the same: try booting from a bootable CD. If it works, then use any disk repair tools on the bootable CD to try and fix the hard drive and/or copy any important files off of it.

But anytime I have hard disk problems, I assume it’s about to die completely. One file error every six months is nothing, but more than one independent problem in a month is a bad sign. Once disks start having errors, they almost never get better, only worse.

Of course, it’s good to always assume your drive will die at any moment, and make backups with that mindset, but once you’ve had problems, assume it even more.

16

Your systems are not consistent with a corrupted file system. The fact that you sometimes get to the start menu and sometimes don’t indicates that the drive itself is sometimes reading data and sometimes not. You’ve got a bad disk.

If you never got to the start menu then you might have a corrupted file system, but it would boot the same way every time if you did.

The TOSHIBA screen comes from the BIOS. The BIOS does things like determines how much memory you have, allocates resources for PCI devices, etc. then tries to find a disk to boot from. Your symptoms indicate that the BIOS is operating fine (which means that your motherboard and other hardware is probably ok) but the system seems to be unreliably reading the disk.

It is possible that the disk controller chip on the motherboard has gone wonky, but it is much more likely that the disk itself is dying but not quite dead.

Booting from a CD, as others have mentioned, may give you more clues about what is going on.

17

I would recommend burning a free Ultimate Boot CD, booting off it, and going to the HDD|Diagnostics section. Try running the Seagate one first; if it shows that the drive is from a different manufacturer then reboot and launch the appropriate program instead.

Run the most thorough test and see what happens. If it should happen to pass with no errors (which sounds unlikely from what you’ve described), reboot, go to the Memory section, and try running the Windows Memory Diagnostic for an hour or so and see if it comes up with any errors.

The good news is that hard drives are pretty cheap, and usually not very hard to replace.

18

Exactly what I would have said. The advice here is essentially saying the same thing as Other Guy. It’s just that some people are going ahead and diagnosing the hard drive failure, which is most likely the problem. The other choices are quite remote, since the BIOS is loading properly, and the response is not always the same.

It’s just that some people are more comfortable declaring the extremely likely as the actual answer.

Just don’t replace the hard drive until you have tried one of the Boot CDs mentioned. (If you need help getting one to work, I’m sure people here can help.) The UBC mentioned by Numbers sounds like it is pretty newbie friendly.

19

There are plenty of ways to make a computer self-destruct. Laptops are especially vulnerable to overheating. The protections are getting better though. And sometimes failures are not the result of a virus. Hardware breaks, and some software is broken to start with. Just keep everything backed up, and scan for viruses often.

20

I was kinda wondering about this aspect myself.

You could be looking at a thermal problem as well as a file system problem. The getting to safe mode prompt if you leave it off for an hour or so can be a sign of that. A motherboard component overheating could be interfering with your ability to read an otherwise functional drive or I have seen hard drives run hot as well.

I am also curious how you are determining the 3 seconds of HDD activity, if it because you hear something you can be hearing fan or optical drive boot attempts. Hard drives are pretty quiet.

I would try to find a windows CD and try to boot to recovery console and run a chkdsk /r

If that gets to finish, you probably have an OK hard drive, your PC may be running hot and the file system got borked on a lockup.

If it is a heat issue you may just need to go wild on the vents with a can of air or get a chillpad for it.