[quote author=booglywoogly link=topic=3735.msg28410#msg28410 date=1162882039
You may think that the failure wasn’t caused by software, but I do. The drive was only a year old and I had never had any problems with it.
[/quote]
Hi. Please take no offense but I know for a fact it didn’t cause this. I have been repairing computers for quite some time and would hope I know what I am talking about otherwise my customers wouldn’t be too pleased.
Aside from this, and once again, no offense but it’s impossible that a software wouldn’t allow you to access the bios, destroy your hard drive, etc… Now in my history of fixing computers, a couple of things are a bit confusing here. How did you copy your data from a drive you can’t recognize? Even as slave, “most likely” wouldn’t show your information if that badly damaged. It went from not being recognized to being recognized and you copying all your data? If the bios won’t recognize it, it won’t with another drive installed with Windows either. As well, you say windows cd wouldn’t start up, well if it didn’t find a drive, it won’t install. As for the bios, CAV is NOT in any way going to access this. What you had is a bad hard drive. So, it’s been a year huh? LOL. I chuckle(not at you) but because I replaced three Maxtors in a few months. All bad. One bad from install sounded like a welding arc, two others in 3 months time. This isn’t unusual and why I always keep my 1-2 year warranty paper. Also why backing up should be a standard by anyone and is a hard learned lesson if not. I would guarantee what you had was simply a corrupt OS and thought the hard drive shot , so bought a new one. You found the bios? The bios doesn’t go missing, this would mean a firmware breakdown in which case no recovery or the chip got up and decided to take a midnight stroll. Do you mean you found how to access the bios in Cmos setup? tapping some common keys F12, F8, F1, F2, Del ?
On to what I really believe happened…
As well, I will say for sure it wasn’t COMODO. >>hal.dll is a very common dual boot failure of some sort. This means you either had two OSs either two drives, or two OSs on one drive. This traces back to a corrupt boot.ini file. I use knoppix to go in and repair the boot.ini file, the hal.dll goes away and bam, OS back up most of the time. I would almost GUARANTEE you were dual booting.
Once again, I truly mean no offense but I would hope I know enough that impossibilities, especially this many together, are not going to happen and I simply think you misunderstand what happened and believe it to be CAV. It could have happened any day, it just seems it always picks times when people install new software. Not just hal.dll, but hard disk crashes, etc…which lead people to believe it’s software. Of course this makes sense, if you are using \putting the hard drive under strain, it stands to reason. I hope this makes sense to you a bit and why I am not trying to debunk you, just stating what can or can’t be.
Paul
P.S. Kishork covered the virus aspect very well so no need for me to go there