Security Tool - a nightmare coming your way.

Over the last two months it has been my bad luck to run into Security Tool - a phoney antivirus that is itself a virus. ST has caused incredible chaos and seems, against all the accepted wisdom, capable of damaging a hard drive. At our first encounter it wrecked a Samsung 80gig SATA external drive, and then appeared on my desktop Dell.
I was able to start Malwarebytes, which discovvered 18 infections, but on rebooting, my box is useless. I hear a new Dell Bios flash may restore function, but how did ST ruin an external drive - which now shows up in Windows, but with zero storage capacity?

 

Thanks for the fast reply, but, no, I didn't get too much info as my Dell was in safe mode and I wanted to reboot fast to make sure I had gotten rid of ST.
When I looked in the bios, my boot sequence had altered, then, when I reset it to boot from my XP copy, nothing happened. I'm no IT whiz, so I'll get a shop to reset the bios and fix whatever is fixable. Most of my stuff is backed up, so no dramas there, but I was running Panda Cloud, which is supposed to be riding shotgun on crap like Security Tool.

 

Thanks, Kestrel, your blood's worth bottling. But I finally bit the bullet and saved myself the anguish of repair by buying another ex-bank Dell for very few dollars. The only reason I had stuck to the ancient GX260 was its PS2 keyboard connector, since that way I could use my favourite Logitech keyboard. However I was finally able to find a USB/PS2 adapter that actually works, so it's all fine.
One thing I'm still very curious about is whether a powerfully destructive virus like the Security Tool that I ran into can actually damage hardware. I'm still mighty sore at how my almost new Samsung external HD was instantly creamed, and now shows up only as a drive - with no storage capacity. Any ideas?