[SC_Republican]

Not necessarily a virus. It could be a hard drive failure.

[Blueflag]

I hope you have a good back up of your data.

Time for a new hard drive. Also, check your motherboard for blown or swelling capacitors.

But first, if you get the thing running, back up your data.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Do as goldstategop says, get a ghosting program. IIRC it will allow you to hook up both HD's at the same time and copy EVERYTHING from the old disk to the new one and you won't have to reload any of the programs.

[Area51]

Nah, but you may have caught a case of internet herpies!

[PBRSTREETGANG]

HAVE I BEEN HIT BY MBLASTER?

NO, BUT FROM HERE IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'VE BEEN HIT BY MUGLYSTICK.

(Just kidding.)

[RISU]

Reinstall windows over the top of the previous installation.

The likelyhood you need new hardware is about zero! Don't let this "force" you to "buy".

It is probably a corrupted Master Boot Record (MBR), because someone somewhere was trying to take "Remote Control" of your machine, and modifying the MBR is the way they do that.

Another option is to use two hard drives and keep only the Operating System in the first one. That way you can wipe the entire syustem off the first drive and reinstall it without losing data and oprograms stored below in drive two.

Use "ZoneAlarm" (free) and goto Gibson's site "GPC>COM" to learn how to protect your machine and test it for vulnerability to "Remote Administration", which is the curse we are living under right now.

[dinasour]

The drive might have crashed, and you may have lost everything.

However, if the operating system files have been corrupted, or you have a bad disk controller, the data files that you want may still be there.

If you replace your current c: drive, install (or have someone install) the old one as drive d: and see what's you can get.

Be careful that a repair shop doesn't just reformat the drive old drive as a matter of course.

[Lunatic Fringe]

Definitely NOT a virus. This is a hard drive problem. Get a new one.

[KansasConservative1]

My I suggest.. based on your stated lack of computer experience. I would recommend that you go to compusa or equivilent and buy a maxstore or Western Digital 40 - 80 Gig HD (Should be plenty for average user) and have them install it for you (sometimes for free) as well as loading up your HP OS etc (may cost some money). On this thread everyone will debate what drive and how to install. I think you need to get running again and unless you have a ton of time to learn a new skill, let compusa or a savvy friend help you get through this. KC1

[L_Von_Mises]

Someone else suggested that it may be a corrupt master boot record or partition table. Either one will give you the same symptoms. There are viruses out there that will corrupt your boot record so if you have any AV programs and have the emergency disk or bootable cd that might help if it was caused b a virus.

From a startup disk can you access the drive? If so then you should be able to get any important data off of it. I have had drives fail and when they do - they do. You can't access them at all.

Before you go out and get a new hard disk I would first try to get any data off it that you can that you might need. Then see if you can locate a utility that will repair it (TestDrive supposedly works well). If you can't do that then once you get any important data off it then boot up using a win98 startup disk and run fdisk /mbr then format it. This will create a new MBR and you are now starting from scratch. You might also want to run a low-level format on it using the drive utilities from the manufacturer of your hard disk.

I have corrupted my MBR on more than one occasion. After that happened the first time I went out and bought a good tape drive and now regularly back up everything onto tape.

A new hard disk is your last resort. If it is your drive you stll may be able to get the data off of it - http://www.midwayisd.org/PDFs/help/200ways.pdf

[L_Von_Mises]

After reading your post again I noticed that my neighbor had the exact same symptoms - can't find OS, diskcheck ran forever and never completed.

It was a laptop and he had no floppy and he did not have any OS CDs or recovery CDs so I decided it wasn't worth my aggravation to try to deal with it. He had ME on his system and ended up taking it to a local shop and the guy charged almost $100 to reinstall ME. For that he could have just bought XP and installed that instead.

With the xp disks you may be able to fix it. It could even be something as simple as your boot.ini file being corrupted. Is your disk ntfs or fat32? If it ntfs you won't be able to see the drive except with the xp startup disks. I had that happen a few years ago with Win2K and I called MS and they walked me through fixing it using the installation CD. He sent me an e-mail describing the steps. If you think that will help I can search for it and freepmail you what he sent me.