Virus Damage to Hard Drives

[RoadClosed]

It seems appropriate, like Sir Dice mentioned, to determine WHAT controlls the disk and then WHAT controls the mirror. For example, if the RAID or Mirror is controlled via a hardware controller then, does the controller recognize the disk? If so you will need to rebuild the RAID or Mirror and proceed. To eliminate any off the above, could another PC be used to format the disk. That will eliminate RAID controller isses for now and provide a base to t-shoot the controller issues and rebuild the strip or mirror.

[da'dodo]

Theoretically, would it be possible to overwrite the bios, and alter the power levels that go to a reader/writer head? In the case of a CD drive, this could melt the CD (you can alter the beam intensity for different densities or something, I heard), although I'm not sure if the BIOS has that level of control over the hardware...

[tyfon]

Anout one month ago i had posted a question on this (name of the topic was 'can you harm hardware remotely?') and i had got many answers...if you search the forum area you will find it. There, they were mentionned some viruses that can affect hard drives..i dont know how to make links that's why i dont give you the link...take the time to read it i think it can help you...

[DVMTech]

Thanks for the outstanding feedback. For now, we scrapped the second drive as we feel it is permanentlty damaged and it is not worth getting it to "work" only to have something go wrong. A new drive was installed, the Raid controller has the mirror working perfectly and order is restored. I am going to check some of the links that were suggested to get more info on physical damage to hard drives as a direct result of a virus attack. Feel free to continue to provide input when available to this thread. Thanks again for the help.

[AxessTerminated]

Yes. I got one a while back on an older machine. The virus write to CMOS and has your [4500RPM] HDD try to run at maybe [7200RPM], or faster, thus rendering your harddrive useless. I haven't found much info on this online, just a few things on how to use assembly to write to CMOS.

[phantomj104]

Hi All,

I just finished fixing a ladys laptopwith the same problem, with one exception.. she had aquired the PTsnoop , then someone dropped in BAT/MUNGA and let it go.. she only rebooted, but it got about 70% of her drive before she shut down.. luckily, I was able to recover all of her clusters through fdisk/s but it took all of 6 hours to do it.. afterwards I reinstalled Everthing, and to my suprise everything worked well I then did the whole PT Snoop Colon Trick, and everything is working well.

Cheers

[RoadClosed]

What makes you think there was a virus? Hard drives die all the time... from "natural" causes.

[phantomj104]

Hey Roadclosed, as a matter of fact , that is what has happened to the system I was talking about...

The customer had failed to mention she had reciently dropped her laptop...Imagine that....

Cheers

[ZomBieMann77]

Hard drives die all the time... from "natural" causes.

does smashing the damned thing with a 10lb sledge hammer because the comp is pissing you off count as natural causes?

Seriously though, if the old HDD has been removed and replaced what did you do with the old one? I would ask the powers that be if i could examin it further if i were in your shoes. If its been replaced then taking a look at it to see if it can be fixed wouldnt hurt. Like a few others have said try low level formating it. That resets all the information on the entire drive to 0.

[silver-bullets]

The only reason I can think that a virii writer would want to damage an HDD was coperate espionage, or they own a HDD manufacturing plant and they want money . I have huge doubts about a virus damaging and HDD, although dropping or the sledgehammer (zombie!) might... you never know though.

-Cheers-