How is this even possible?

Old Dell tower, Dimension 3000, WinXP Home SP3. The PC boots to the desktop just fine, Windows seems to run OK (considering it's a slow 2ghz Celeron with only 512mb RAM), but Internet Explorer hard locks the PC, and that's why I'm working on it, but that isn't the strange thing here..... no hard drive appears in the Device Manager! I attached a screen shot below. I have tried using all the different View options, and still no hard drive. How is that possible? The system boots, it runs, portable FireFox works for internet access (IE locks the PC), and everything except for IE seems to be completely normal.... :confused Weird, no?

 

Possible rootkit?

 

What does Disk Management show?:confused

Or maybe the name (Dell) is the reason.:-D

 

roflmao

.... and you're today's winner! I ran TDSSkiller on it (after running MalwareBytes, Avira's AntiVir, and SuperAntiSpyware), and it found a compromised netbt.sys file in the System32 folder. Once that was nailed, the HD re-appeared.