I left my computer on when I went to work yesterday. When I got home I went into my office to turn it off. While I was gone my task manager ran my anti-virus check. A window was displaying that it found 1 virus and healed it. The computer seemed frozen so I tried to restart it. Suddenly my hard drive made a loud clicking noise that I've never heard before and a black screen popped up that said NO OPERATING SYSTEM FOUND then a blue screen appeared that said CANNOT WRITE TO C DRIVE (or something like that). Could my computer erase it's own hard drive? Help! Thanks in advance.

go into the bios, see if the harddrive autodetect will find the harddrive again. you won't lose any data.

I will try but last night it wouldn't let me do anything because it couldn't go any further than that black screen. Is the bio found in the properties of the C drive? Any other thoughts? Thanks

Your C drive may be showing wear from bad sectors in the system files areas.Try booting with a boot disk and see if C can be accessed. If you can, you run scandisk to check the surface. If you suspect a boot sector virus ,you can run: fdisk /mbr .You access the bios when the computer starts by pressing del or any other key shown on the display.Your bios is stored on a ROM (a small permanent program that may be flashed in modern computers) on the motherboard and is independant of the hard drive.The bios settings you choose are saved in the CMOS battery powered memory and combined with the ROM programs keep track of basic hardware and look for the operating sytem files on the hard drive , diskette drive or cd-ROM drive to boot the computer. Good luck.

You might try booting to a floppy disk and from the A: promt, type sys c: This will restore the IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM files. In other words, your boot files. Hope this helps.

Hmm . Been a day so i figure youve found out already, but in case you havent, "loud click" sounds to me like your harddrive up an died. If so you wont be able to copy stuff to it or anything (obviously) so no point "sys"ing it.Might start up on its own again tho, and the data's all still on there, so if it does start up again you best mirror all the files to another drive, and replace it. once they start clicking they dont have that long left.