A nasty tracker virus killed my A-drive. Win ME thinks the device is operating properly. But booting up with a start disk, PC does not recognize that a disk is in the A-drive. If I try to access A-drive from Win ME, the PC hangs up for about 45 secs and then asks me to insert disk into the drive. Is there a way to restore recognition of my A-drive without Restoring my PC? A-drive seems as if it had been unplugged. Restoring the PC from scratch does work to make A-drive work again. Thank you all. Beaker

Do you know the name of the virus?

There is no virus that can physically damage hardware. It's an urban legend. The drive just went bad is all. Jimi_l

I don't believe this is a common virus. Norton, McAfee, nor AVG antivirus software cannot detect it. I believe it is a specific virus targeted at my PC. This virus wrote to my Norton AV installation disk to damage it. I saw my 3-color LED on the CD RW drive blink red and the CD never loaded again. Blinking red indicates a write operation in my drive. The CD drive is fine since it still allows me to load games, copy MP3s and install MusicMatch. I do not believe the A-drive is physically damaged. The last time the virus disabled the A-drive, it worked again after a format and restore of the HD. This virus stays quiet just key-logging and framing at 20 fpm until I try to kill it. When it detects that I am trying to fight it, it turns nasty and does things like destroy CD-ROM for Norton and disables the A-drive. When I tried to erase certain files it uses (while I am in DOS), it even created a file in the folder called "DUMMIE" to laugh at me. My firewall keeps asking for permission for Windows to use my keyboard manager to access the internet. It creates multiple copies of "desktop.ini" all over the place. It tracks my internet pages in the index.dat file at c:\windows\Tempor~1\content.ie5. Much of the index.dat is symbols, but you can see a chronilogical record of the websites I visited throughout. I used the A-drive to put in a Start Up disk to periodically erase the index.dat file and I guess the virus figured this out and killed the A-drive.

Really... Sounds like you may need professional help. Jimi_l

sounds like some one is remote hacking you. ••• Resistance is invigorating! •••kill spyware

Beaker, Are you running up-to-date antivirus and spyware programs? If not, make sure you install some. Have you received any executable files from people you know or don't know? Are you running any kind of chat programs like IRC, or Messenger programs like MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AIM?