I am trying to reformat the hard drive in this machine. I uninstall a bunch of applications that I didn't need anymore in there and the PC was already a bit unstable and this make it worts. While I'm formatting the hard drive the system shows the message "Trying to recover allocation unit XXXXXX". For what I read in from another message, this can be because the drive is damaged. Unfortunatly another computer that was connected to the same net here has it hard drive crashed too, a few days ago, and the technician said that the hard drive was phycally damaged. I was wondering if all these problems can be caused by some kind of virus or it is just a bad coincidence. MFC

It could be both to be honest. There are bugs and network bugs that can actualy dmage the surface of the hard drive. Just like a program that crashe's once to often it can damage the surface of the drive. Normaly hard drive tools can fix and recover damaged clusters on the drive, but from time to time they cant. What you may wish to try is doing a Low level format of the drive. This requires down loading the special tools available from the manufacturers web site. Or perhaps dwon load an ISO image of the Ultimate Boot CD, from. Ultimatebootcd.com There are a number of real good tools that you can use to do this. But keep in mind when you perfom a low level format the data will be lost forever... Hope that helps IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT A8N-SLI Deluxe AMD X64 3500+ Wnchst Corsair 2x512 DDR400 Dual Channel GV-NX6600128D PCIX Graphics Card Ggbyte GT Pro CPU Cooler Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cool

There is no virus that can cause physical damage. Data loss yes but no more than that. Jimi_l

Malware cannot do any physical damage to a computer. At least not easily. What it possibly could do is mark sectors of a hard drive as bad. Though I have not heard of a virus author sinking that low. More likely, the drives on the computers are aproaching the end of their useful life. If all the computers are the same as the one you listed, they would be 7 or 8 years old.

Sorry to disagree with you guys but you are very wrong.. Nasty baugs etc, large aplicatuions, bla bla can cause damage to the hard drive itself...Every time they crash or cause a program to crash they cause such intense hard drive activity the heads can make contact with the drive surface. Perhaps not as common place in home personal computing but can be readily seen in bussines level computing etc.. It is rare I do agree with that but it can and does happen... IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT A8N-SLI Deluxe AMD X64 3500+ Wnchst Corsair 2x512 DDR400 Dual Channel GV-NX6600128D PCIX Graphics Card Ggbyte GT Pro CPU Cooler Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cool

Howyagoing Janos? Whilst I agree that malware can cause excessive disk activity, I cannot see how that could cause a head crash. For the heads to come into contact with the platters, the disk has to stop spinning or the drive must be subject to rapid acceleration (such as when it hits the floor after being dropped). The extra wear caused by the extra load caused by malware would in most cases be neglegible. It may however be enough to push a drive that is about to die, over the edge. In this instance, it is likely that the drive would have died a few days later without the malware.

Thank you guys for your inside. The hard drive and the PC were so old that they decide do not waste more time with it and adquire a new PC. We have been checking the rest of the net and no simptoms of viruses have been found so far. Thanks again for your help. MFC