Some of the newer BIOS’s have log files. He should boot into BIOS setup mode and see if it has any error reports logged. I doubt it’s a virus. I think it’s a real hardware alert.
The drive is hosed.
Just as an fyi, if a drive starts giving failure alerts like this you can sometimes rescue them for long enough to copy important data - put it in a plastic bag and put it IN YOUR FREEZER for an hour or so!
True! It works! Been there!
Bot recommended for very humid climates...
and if it is truly a hardware failure, running a hundred virus scans is just about the worst thing you could do...
Concur. If there’s truly an imminent hard drive failure, GET THAT DATA OFF!
You can always scan it on another machine, and you can always delete the copied data if we’re wrong about failure and nothing’s infected, but it sounds to me like your OS install was ruined when the hard drive began to fail. Seen it before, got damn lucky that it was only the OS eaten. Managed to save every relevant file including game saves from the user directory, and stuff on the desktop.
But, use it as little as possible in the process of simply getting the data off the drive, and prioritize. The less that’s done to the drive, the more chance you’ll be able to save more/everything before complete failure.
I had this thing a few months ago.
The virus is only emulating a SMART failure warning. There is most likely nothing wrong with his hardware.
I had to pay our IT shop to fix mine. They ran combofix, malwarebytes, superspyremover, spybot, AVG.