[liberateyourmind]

The story goes that I managed to contract a virus on my computer which caused a world of problems with the only (sensible) solution being to reformat and start a fresh (and obviously take more precautions to stop the same happening again in the future )

Before I reformatted I wanted to back up all my music, documents, pictures etc. so I moved all of my essential files (such as word documents and pictures) onto an external USB 80gb hard drive but the problem I had was that I wanted to back up my music, and for this I needed more space. I decided that I would back this up on the second hard drive (120 GB DiamondMax Plus 9) installed on my computer which should be left alone during the clean install of the system. I feel however that the virus may very well have made its way onto this internal hard drive as I shall now explain.

I unplugged the external hard drive from my computer leave the two remaining hard drives inside my computer and re-formatted and re-installed windows xp home edition. Straight away after the install I realised that the virus was active because my system was showing the same symptoms as before (Could not update antivirus/ spyware programs or visit their web pages to do a manual update, also accessing the internal drives on my computer brought up an error which I cannot remember the name of. I do know it involved lots of number though which I realise is probably little help. The third symptom was that when doing a Google search and clicking on a link, these links would open up in a new window and seemingly selectively either take me to my desired destination or just a random webpage)

Trying everything i could to get it working again I unplugged the hard drive with my backed up information on and Feeling that maybe the virus was in the boot sector the hard drive with the OS on I repaired that using the windows recovery console. I then reformatted and re installed windows again and it worked fine this time.

I re instated my backed up data from the external HDD that I put documents and pictures on after scanning it for viruses about 3 times to get it clean ( it found 12 viruses the first and second time).
Now I am trying to recover the data that was on the second hard drive in my computer, and i decided that a good way to do this (and give me the most control over what is accessing the hard drive) would be to use an IDE to USB device that I bought a little while ago (for model information a link to this is at the bottom of this post) I plugged everything in and turned it on and I get the error message "A problem occurred during installation" in a balloon tip and the hard drive does not appear in My Computer or is visible in Disk Management. I have also tried to plug it into my laptop but it just doesn’t do anything, though that could be because either the ports do not have enough power, or before they are not usb 2.0.

Does anyone have any solutions as to what might be the problem here?
Regards
Stephen


p.s. my Desktop PC does have usb 2.0 ports

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...C=SO&U=strat15

[liberateyourmind]

I solved the problem by testing me IDE to usb device on an old 6GB hard drive I have hanging about, after I knew it was working I plugged the drive I wanted back into the device again and windows found it this time.