Can a virus cause a hard drive to fail? And other moral dilemmas

[Comtech Solutions]

Ok, here's my situation that I'm struggling with:

Customer calls and says 4 month old Dell desktop acting very strange, very slow, can't get AV to work. Doesn't mind shutting down for a few days until I see it.

It's vista, and as soon as i turn it on it wants to run chkdsk. I cancel and after 15 inutes, it finally boots into windows. AVG is turned off and when I try to open, I get error msgs and unable to access it. I try to install spybot same error msg. Classic virus symptoms, right? Restart machine and try to boot into safe mode - machine hangs after making choice for safe mode.

I removed the sata hard drive and plug into my new sabrent sata/ide usb cable (which i have used succesfully on 1 IDE and 1 Sata drive in the 3 days since I got it). Immediately get a puff of smoke from the HD. Unplug while my heart sinks.

Now I'm not sure if my cable caused this or not and if I am brave enough to plug another HD into it to see the results. Also not sure if I caused the HD to smoke or if this was the result of the 20 minutes of use the computer had (after being shut off by the customer a few days earlier immediately after he suspected something was funny). Could a virus cause HD to fail? Am I buying the customer a new HD with Vista?

I suppose we all have to watch at least 1 HD die in front of our eyes. This was my first (just celebrated my first year in business) It was more dramatic and heart-wrenching than anything you can see on ER or Grey's Anatamy.

Any and all thoughts greatly appreciated.....

 

[purple_minion]

Logic would dictate that it was the cable you plugged in as that is exactly when it happened, though perhaps there is a small chance that static could have caused something to latch up or be destroyed to help the frying along. I have read a few reviews on newegg about some of the adapters frying drives so that's my guess. I personally haven't bought an adapter yet but these kinds of things make my a bit wary. As for a virus, I would think to destroy the drive it could overwrite the firmware or perhaps do a low level format to "destroy" the drive, but attack the components I don't see how... unless they have microcontrolled voltage sources that get cranked too high through firmware.

 

[gunslinger]

I see 4 problems here.

1. Vista
2. AVG
3. A drive that may have already been close to failing
4. The adapter you used.


If you have used the cable before and all was well, my money is on a drive that was ready to crap out anyway. I have used my sata/ide usb cable on maybe 20-25 hard drives so far without problems.

Now, lets say you did actually get into the drive. The combo of Vista with AVG? Thats like Windows ME and BonziBUDDY. Death to any machine. Although I don't think it killed your drive.

 

[abe]

I see 4 problems here.

1. Vista
2. AVG
3. A drive that may have already been close to failing
4. The adapter you used.


If you have used the cable before and all was well, my money is on a drive that was ready to crap out anyway. I have used my sata/ide usb cable on maybe 20-25 hard drives so far without problems.

Now, lets say you did actually get into the drive. The combo of Vista with AVG? Thats like Windows ME and BonziBUDDY. Death to any machine. Although I don't think it killed your drive.

hi gunslinger, I know we usually see eye to eye but, I've been running vista with avg for over a year on my personal laptop without any problems, yeah win 7 is more snappy but vista works fine. so I don't know what I'm doing right but it works for me.

maybe I just don't know how good my laptop would run with xp/nod32 but I'm not having problems

 

[14049752]

And I'm sure Vista caused the drive to suddenly start smoking.

 

[Comtech Solutions]

Hmmm, thanks for the thoughts.

I've also run AVG successfully on many Vista machines. So I'll rule out AVG and Vista as the culprits here. I'd also like ot rule out the HD because it's only 4 months old (although these things do fail sometimes).

Maybe I should send the sabrent cable back to Tigerdirect? Like i said, I just got the cable, though I have used it sucesfully on 1 sata drive and on 1 ide drive previously.

What do you guys think - Am I buying this guy a new HD with Vista?


I am going to see if it is covered under warranty.....

 

[nelsonm]

As they say... sh*t happens!

Apply the process of elimination.

1. is it possible to plug a drive onto the Sabrent connector backwards?

2. Test the drive connector side usb cable for proper voltages. Do you have a multimeter and a sata/ide cable tester?

3. test the voltages off of the Dells' ide power cable.

4. boot from a live cd like Ubuntu or UBCD and see if the drive can be accessed and to start an immediate image backup.

If you can't insert the drive backwards and the power connector voltages for both yours and the Dells' are correct, then i would conclude that the drive was having problems. If it's your cable then you still have no problems other than trashing your clients personal data if you didn't or couldn't backup the drive.

I personally do not use external usb to sata/ide adapters for testing drives since USB can supply voltage through the cable. I use a shop desktop computer configured for testing, backups and repair. I have an ide and sata data cable along with two drive power cables hanging out of the case to plug customers drives onto. I also keep an older spare sata and ide drive handy to plug into the clients computer for testing and backups. Either way, it's much faster for testing and backups to hook up a drive directly to an internal sata or ide connector then to use a external USB adapter.

Do the right thing, call Dell and get the driver replaced under warranty, reinstall their system and apps and charge them for normal repair services.

 

[gunslinger]

And I'm sure Vista caused the drive to suddenly start smoking.

If you had finished reading my post you would have seen this:

Although I don't think it killed your drive.

 

[14049752]

If you had finished reading my post you would have seen this:

I know...I saw that. I just like to give you a hard time about how much you hate Vista, sometimes. No hard feelings?

 

[usacvlr]

Although this was not the cause of the smoke.. there was a virus that simply forced the heads to traverse all the way one way and all the way the other way across the platters over and over again until the thing beat itself to pieces. For whatever reason hardware killer viruses are very rare. There was a floppy drive killer like this too eons ago.

 

[purple_minion]

Although this was not the cause of the smoke.. there was a virus that simply forced the heads to traverse all the way one way and all the way the other way across the platters over and over again until the thing beat itself to pieces. For whatever reason hardware killer viruses are very rare. There was a floppy drive killer like this too eons ago.

I don't doubt that there are ways of killing the drive but destroying parts by out of spec voltages/currents might be a bit much. Maybe they have figured out a way to reprogram the fireware and maybe there is a way with the duty cycle of some mosfets I see on my drive here in front of me to blow them if it's too high. I've done it in some of my projects as it's easy to do. However I still blame the cable as it is going to have maybe level conversions, power supply filtering, etc. and I'll bet it's made in china with the cheapest parts available.

What happened to me once was I had a databank, which is basicly a 2.5in laptop drive in a small enclosure with a card reading integrated for those long trips with your digital camera, plug in the card and it copies it to the drive, saves buying lots of cards for the long trips right? Well anyway, one day I was using it as just an external drive to transfer some files, I plugged in the usb cable, which can recharge it, but can't really power it as we all know. So since I'm going to use it a while and don't want to drain the battery I plug in the power cord, instantly the drive is gone and XP complains about an overload or something in the system tray. I tell you scared the crap out of me, and it wouldn't work until I rebooted and gave everything a rest. Moral of the story, plug the power in first then the usb. I believe there was a transient power spike that made it into the usb port. Should it have had filtering or some kind of isolation? Probably. Maybe it was just a murphy's law thing.

It's possible the drive was dying, but most drives wear out or whatnot. If it was a faulty part on the board why didn't it blow in the computer through all those reboots. I've had dying drives I had no idea were dead until I rebooted since I leave my machines on constantly. As soon as that power cycling happens its all over. I'm not saying that it's not possible, I would just eyeball that cable closely. Any chance of taking some voltage measurements? Also two hard drives before this one is not a good test, maybe those drives were more tolerant of voltages. As I said before I've read on a few newegg reviews where people said they had the same thing happen to them with some cables, plugged it in and let all the magic smoke out.

 

[Comtech Solutions]

T complete the thread:

Dell will be taking the PC back and replacing the HD and OS. Whew! I'm also buying a new Sata/IDE cable - I'll try a different brand than Sabrent this time.....

 

[nonchalant]

Ive had this happen before. Lost 3 (old) HDD's that simply smoked when plugged into power. Not game to try anymore I decided it may be to do with too many devices running off one outlet so I split them up and havent had the issue since..

 

[Comtech Solutions]

Nonchalant, that's very interetsing. I had not thought about that, but the outlet that was plugged into had about 7 other things plugged in. That's good info going forward....