Can a virus damage a hard drive?

FishPolice

FishPolice

FishPolice

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As per title really.

A work colleague took his pc back to the shop that originally ripped him off (oops I mean sold him the pc) because windows started misbehaving & eventually refused to load. The shop has just called him & told him they think the hard drive might be knackered as a result of a virus (ie his fault & not a dodgy hard drive -system was purchased this summer so is under warranty).
I told him a virus can't physically damage a hard drive. What do you guys think?

They already scammed him big time on the pc when he bought it so I suspect foul play here too.
 
No way a virus can physicly damage a hard disc drive, no way software can destroy a hdd.

Worst thing as said above = format or kill partition, but i've never ever heard of something that stupid that hdd can be damaged by a virus...
 
As above not a chance of a virus doing physical damage, it is software based so can only corrupt the data that is there, if the drive was already dying then it might be able to tip it over the edge because of the increased load but that is a very unlikely set of circumstances and it isn't directly caused by the virus anyway.

About the only way I can imagine a virus physically killing a hard drive is if you sneeze on the circuit board while it is running.
 
FishPolice said:
The shop has just called him & told him they think the hard drive might be knackered as a result of a virus (ie his fault & not a dodgy hard drive -system was purchased this summer so is under warranty).
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That's rubbish. No way a drive can be physically damaged from a virus. Laughable. A format would fix any virus trouble, and data can be recovered with a bit of effort. But what is the usual position on viri and warranty? Is that not the user's fault, i.e for not installing anti-virus software? I can see that being an easy get out clause for a company refusing to cover warranty. How is this drive supposedly knackered though? If there is anything physically wrong with the drive and it's under warranty, then your friend is covered. Unless he opened the drive and started playing around with the disk heads! If the data is just corrupted etc. then this is easily fixable anyway.
 
what about if a virus was programmed to initiate a bios/firmware flash on a said component and deliberately fail it?.

Wouldn't this render a hardware component useless or dead?
 
billbennett said:
what about if a virus was programmed to initiate a bios/firmware flash on a said component and deliberately fail it?.

Wouldn't this render a hardware component useless or dead?
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I don't think it would be possible or at the very least highly unlikely, most bios/firmware flashes need to be done from a boot disk in DOS so the virus would have to restart the computer, have pre-written the new firmware to a floppy disk that happened to be sitting in the drive, have to be very similar to the firmware that the specific drive was expecting and most flashes ask you to confirm if you want to go through with it.

I suppose it could be done but it would require quite a set of coincidences and be pretty rare if it were possible. :)
 
FishPolice said:
The shop has just called him & told him they think the hard drive might be knackered as a result of a virus

...
I suspect foul play here too.
Click to expand...

may be the shop assistant just described the thing in a very non-specific way, he could have mentioned the partition table or bad blocks or missing boot files or corrupted registry or mounting point... we will never know what it was because many shop assistants are quite unprofessional and they should direct the customer elsewhere to obtain the answer they are looking for but obviously the easy cheaper way is to replace rather than repair/rebuild so they send it back to manufacturer to have it replaced. Or they just push the customer to use their repair centre or get an 090x tech.support number to call.
In your case I can guarantee that the hard drive was 100% fixable and its files intact with some utilities.

By the way, some viruses can destroy the partition table or make it looking like so, some can hide in the MBR, some can stick in the cmos chip of the motherboard, I have head
in all these cases there is a software that reconstructs or checks for boot viruses..
Heat, handling, positioning, weather, operating conditions, dust, electric shocks, incorrect computer shutdown.. these can physically damage the hard drive.
 
ok so I was right when I told him they were talking rubbish. Thought so but nice to make sure :)

They told him they found a load of trojans in there & reformatted it. They couldn't be bothered to save any of his files first of course :(

Shame cos I'd offered to sort it for him for nothing but he's adamant he wants to keep his warranty.

The shop took off his mcaffe (spelling?) and replaced it with AVG, ZoneAlarm & Spybot, threw in a soundcard & charged him £60 all in all. Bit of a waste but it's his money I suppose.

Anyway the hard drive seems fine now but I've told him to keep an eye on it. I also told him next time he wants to spend £600+ he should build it himself or at least come here to get spec'd up. The shop told him it was top of the range when he bought it in July this year -it's a 3500 // 6800 // 1gb machine. Does what he wants at the moment but it certainly wasn't "the fastest AMD-based machine" this summer was it?!!
 
£60! He was had!

This is why I would NEVER buy from a shop. EVER. Never been in place yet where they know what they're talking about. Makes me mad! :mad: Make sure your mate doesn't make same mistake next time! And I guess it won't be too long before he'll be wanting to upgrade given that spec he's got! ;)
 
It used to be possible to destroy Hdd's in the old days by initiating low level formats on certain drives. Be intrigued to see if this is still the case?
 
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