Need help! Hard drive failure!!!

Ok, so I am looking for some hedlp on this one. My wife downloaded something off the internet last night and it must have contained a virus because it has messed up the hard drive on the computer.

The computer is a dell desktop, running microsoft windows xp, home edition
(2002 version) and service pack 3.

These are the errors I am getting upon start up. Windows has automatically tried to fix this problem but was not able to.

Errors are:

1) Hard drive does not respnd to system commans
2) Boot sector of hard drive damaged
3)Read time of hard drive clusters less than 500 ms
4) Bad sectors on hard drive or damaged file allocation table
5) 33% of HDD space is unreadable

Can anyone offer any suggestions? Thanks. -Brent

 

Hi, that is a virus. The HD is not bad but they are trying to get you to buy some bogus software. I would post in the Malware section after doing the Read Me First steps.

This is probably what you are seeing and Bleeping Computer is a reputable site so their guide is probably solid but posting in MG's malware removal section might be helpful.

 

Thanks for the advice. I will read the section and post this under the Malware section.