More computer problems at a bad time...

Well, computer problems continue to plague my life. And at the wrong time since I've started school again. Anyways, yesterday I opened up ZoneAlarm and it said it had an update so I proceeded to do so. When it rebooted it got to the "Verifying DMI Pool Data" screen and then below that "Non System Disk or Disk Error". From doing research I know I was either infected by a virus(don't know how though) or even worse my hard drive just broke. Anyone have any clue as to if I can fix this easily or just have more information for me. I'm taking it home next weekend for my Uncle to help me fix. So I'll be without my computer for a whole week and I'll have to use my roomates which really sux since I need it for school. Anyways, thanks.

Well, computer problems continue to plague my life. And at the wrong time since I've started school again. Anyways, yesterday I opened up ZoneAlarm and it said it had an update so I proceeded to do so. When it rebooted it got to the "Verifying DMI Pool Data" screen and then below that "Non System Disk or Disk Error". From doing research I know I was either infected by a virus(don't know how though) or even worse my hard drive just broke. Anyone have any clue as to if I can fix this easily or just have more information for me. I'm taking it home next weekend for my Uncle to help me fix. So I'll be without my computer for a whole week and I'll have to use my roomates which really sux since I need it for school. Anyways, thanks.same thing happend to me, the hard drive was gone, thats the thing that was wrong with mine, it might be somthing else, i dunno, but my guess, the hard drvie went.


Josh

i know that zone alarm gets good reviews but i had only problem with it and i've tried it over several os's and on different computers with the same end result...major messed up OS.....

Some viruses will do that, but it could also very well be a dead hard drive. Also something could have simply happened to the operating system. The first thing I would try in your case is reinstalling windows. Also try seeing if you can boot into safe mode.

The problem your experiencing is something wiped up the first sector of your hard drive.

During the boot of computer, it will do a sequence of boot series to test various hardware, and then goes off to read the first sector of the hard drive, which contains all the necessary boot information to boot up an os.

When an OS is installed onto a pc (IBM compatible type), vital information is written into the first sector of the hard-drive. Its done this way as it was chosen to operate this way during design specification.

So what happend is something wiped out your first sector on your hard drive, and (if your using XP) it'll load up a bootloader (if necessary) and then goes to load up the microkernel which does all initialization and I/O stuff then goes to load the OO kernel of windows.

I think your able to do a repair of the first sector from either the XP cd or using other programs like Partition Magic.