I recently got a virus that shut down my computer and when tried to reboot got a black screen that wanted a boot disk and I was unable to load windows. I used a boot disk but was unable to do anything to the hard drive. I also tried to reinstall with a bootable windows cd but had hard drive problems due to the virus. After playing around with the boot disk for hours I got no where and at deleted the partiation on the drive. Now my computer cant find a hard drive and I have no idea what to do. Can anone tell me how to get my computer to find my virus infected hard drive and then format it and start fresh?

Do you know how to boot into BIOS setup? Is the harddrive listed / recognized? Is it an IDE or SATA drive? What led you to believe it was a virus that caused the problem. Harddrive failure could just as easily explain some of the things you describe. Goin' Fishin' (Some day)

My computer was running a virus scan and came up with a trojan then it got restarted an all of the problems began. When I load bios it finds my sata drive but I am unable to do anything with it and no software is able to install. should i just purchase a new drive... i just feel that this hard drive is fine just really jacked up.

OK now that you have identified it as SATA there is an additional step you need to take if you want to format/reinstal your operating system. Does your system have a floppy drive? Do you have a chipset driver disk for your motherboard? You need to go into bios and make sure the boot order is set to CDROM first. then boot up your XP instal CD. ( Press any key to boot from CD ) next option you get is to press F6 if you need to instal third party driver. You need to do this and this is where the floppy drive comes in. Setup will be looking for your SATA driver before it can continue installing on your SATA harddrive. If you have a chipset driver CD you should be able to extract the SATA driver onto a floppy disk. If you don't have the driver CD you should be able to download the required drivers from the motherboard manufacturer. If your system doesn't have a floppy drive there is a method available to create a slipstreamed Instal CD that incorporates the SATA driver (as well as latest service pack if you want) so you would eliminate the F6 step. Goin' Fishin' (Some day)