Here's the sequence:Virus in many files; used scandisk to fix files;infixing it deleted files; now Ican'tboot up.When I boot with A disk, windows says dr C has no valid FAT or FAT32 partition. And the diagnostic tools are loaded to dr C. Why is this? Now, I also replaced the HD with another HD, which I got off e-bay and which is suppose to be good and this behaves the same way. It acts like it does not recognise dr C. What could be wrong to cause this. I'm lost. Help

.. and your shutdown problem was what? Resolved? Scandisk does nothing for virus, so that's puzzling. It's not clear just what hard drive you're talking about, but whichever it is, it needs to be recognized in the BIOS first. If it is not, then there is no 'drive C:', and that letter is up for grabs - that's why "the diagnostic tools are loaded to dr C" I'm not insensitive, I just don't care.

See whether BIOS can detect the HDD. Also see whether your drive is formatted with Fat32. If not boot up from a diskette and reformat. www.preventiveguru.com - Computer maintenance tips for all. www.discount-store-outlets.com - Best online discount store on the net

In order for a drive to be assigned a drive letter it must be seen by the bios and must have a dos partition on it. The utilities loaded to the first available drive letter, which in your case was C: since no dos HD partition was seen. Verify the drive is properly identified in cmos/bios setup--usually as AUTO and that the jumper settings are correct. Then boot up with a bootdisk and run fdisk. Y to large disk support, then option 4. Exactly what does it say? Your first drive seem to have lost it's partition. A loose or bad data cable can cause that.