I have a Dell 8600 Inspiron which got a virus. The data was not worth rescuing. I just want to start from square 1, but cannot make the HDD bootable. The disk is accessible when the machine is booted from a boot disk, but the cursor just blinks at the top left of a black screen when I try to boot to the HDD. I've used almost every related tool available on my Hirens boot disk and tried others without success.
When I start an OS install from a DOS boot disk, the setup files copy to the drive, but after the initial reboot, it just hangs at the cursor again when trying to boot the HDD.
I have tried the following, among other things, to fix the disk.
- Run full surface scan using several utilities.
- Flashed the BIOS using a boot disk,
- Low level format
- remove MBR and recreate
- Destroy and recreate partition using Acronis Disk Director, Partition Magic FDISK and others
- Use Kapersky boot disk to scan the drive/Boot sector. Found no errors.
in FDISK, the partition is
Partition Status Type Volume Label Mbytes System Usage
C: 1 A PRI DOS OS 95394 FAT32 L 100%
What am I missing?
EDIT: Through an act of persistent stubbornness, I eventually ended up doing the following and was able to recover the drive
- Use Darik's Boot and Nuke to do multiple pass wiping of the drive
- Remove HDD
- Boot from DOS boot disk that contained BIOS update and flashed BIOS
- Reconnected HDD
- Boot from boot disk and run fdisk /mbr
- create partition from fdisk
- format /s /q
- start install of OS from HIRENS Boot disk Mini-XP
Strangely now I can no longer boot from a USB Bootable pen drive. It works the first time, but just shows a blinking cursor after a reboot. If I re-configure it be be bootable again using the "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool", it boots from the USB. Just like the HDD, when it won't boot on the system in question, the drive is still fully functional and passes every test I can throw at it. This leads me to believe there is still something on my system that is corrupting boot devices. Does anyone know of a virulent BIOS virus or other phenomena that might cause this to occur?