Trojan.Agent/Fake-Alert

I was just upgrading my daughters laptop with a new keyboard, cpu fan, hinges, and when I went to boot it up it worked perfectly....for about 60 seconds. It then would automatically shut down. I ran Spin-Rite for over 10 hours doing deep cycle maintanence to try to see if it was either hard drive or video related, (also because it tells HD temps as it monitors the operations). Since it came up perfect on the drive stats, and it never shut down, I ran the Vista repair option from the original Gateway DVD and took it back to the earliest date. It came up just fine,but I started getting Windows Explorer has stopped responding error messages so I updated the anti virus and installed Superantispyware to check the drive. It came back saying it had Trojan.Agent/Fake-Alert. When it finished scanning, I quarantined the virus and the app said to reboot the computer to fully remove the virus. Well it sat there saying shutting down for about 10 minutes so I did a forced shut down. when I rebooted the PC, it went to the setup screen in the bios and there was no hard drive listed. The boot screen says there is no OS, Spin-Rite no longer shows the drive, and when I insert the Vista upgrade disk, it cant find any drive either. I went into the command prompt option of the restore disc and typed C:\ and it said there was no drive. When I typed dir, it showed all my 20 gigs of files and 60 gigs of free space, but its listed as X:\ drive, not C:\ drive. Did the virus hose my drive. It is no longer recognized and unfortunately has disabled the computer. I've worked on literally hundreds of Computers and this is a first.Oh, the computer had not been used since 2008 and I just found it packed away and wanted it for my daughters college.

 

Upon closer examination I realized that X;\ drive is not the data from my c:\ drive, it is the boot drive for the OS setup. After several attempts with multiple disks Nothing I do brings the C:\ drive back or even shows it in the bios. Vista,Win7 Ultimate, and spin-rite 6.0 do not even show the drive. When attemping to do a clean install it keeps directing me to load the drivers for the mass storage device. I used both disks both automatically and manually searched for the driver and it is not located on any disk. consequently the install fails due to no available drive showing.

 

After much thought, I've decided that my next move is to verify the integrity of the hard drive. I found an IDE 2.5 to 3.5 adapter for about $4.00 online and ordered it to find out if the drive will work in my PC. If it works fine,then there is a problem with the motherboard.If it detects but doesn't work, I can run Spin-Rite 6.0 on it to see if that helps. I've heard of viruses that will wipe out a drive, but never one that will completely remove it from detection on a CMOS BIOS, and basically make it disappear. It will not detect with any of the many attempts I've made with multiple programs. I guess it's possible the drive just died.

 

While waiting for the adapter, you might want to try downloading a small linux disto like Puppy and see how that goes. Another linux distro, UBCD has many hard drive and other diagnostics.

 

@ tgell, I downloaded the "ultimate boot" disk and tried it on the drive....to no avail....but, Thank you, it is an awesome program that I will be using a lot. I've actually used it on 2 other computers I was working on and love it!!!! The adapter came in, I installed the drive on my PC, but it doesnt show up there either. I think it must be dead!!! Ordered a new 100 gig for 44.00, that should get the laptop going again. Oh, have you tried the Part Magic app? I have a 500 gig drive with 3 partions on a Win 7 ultimate machine, and I was thinking of expanding my c drive. I have 200 gigs of empty space I used to install new versions of windows...(member of Tech Net).....in multi-boot setups, and never got around to installing them on this machine. Any thoughts?

 

OK, the new drive came in, and it does not show up in the bios or with any of the disk utilities, the install disk for Win7 or Vista, and I've tried every utility on the Ultimate Boot disk to repair or try to make the drive show up. It does not show up in any application. When running boot disk in Linux , the laptop works perfectly, even connecting to the network. I just don't get it. Is it possible that the ide portion of the motherboard died? If so, then why would the DVD work with no trouble......I've built literally hundreds of PC's and repaired probably close to a thousand since 1995. This one has me stumped because its my daughters, and I'm trying to get it going for her college courses. I had 1 virus on a perfectly working computer, removed it, and the shut down hung up. Then I did a forced shutdown after 10 minutes, and it has not worked since..... Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Unless the new drive is also defective..... I've seen worst things happen, like the time i built 3 workstations for a business, and all 3 MB's turned out to be bad. That was a nightmare......