Problem with an external hard-drive....

So my buddy had a virus on his PC..... He never used any anti-spy anti-virus... So he had some help apparently over the phone... managed to get all his important files off onto external drives... So then he wiped his drive in his tower clean and did a refresh install of XP...

I have installed Avast antivirus and superantispyware.... I told him to run a full system scan with Avast... took it 16hrs to check his drive and all his external drives.... Well apparently he also used AVG 8.0... AVG managed to detect the virus that was on the original drive and got rid of it off one of the external drives... how ever his 320g harddrive wont open... It has a "resycled\boot.com" error... Says "resycled\boot.com is not a valid Win32 application. I can't open the drive itself, how ever avast antivirus can still open up the files and do its scan... I am currently letting it run another scan to see if we cant find anything wrong....

Just curious as to if anyone has seen or knows what this is.. I'd assume its a virus program or malware...


Recap:
Wiped Drive
Old saved files on external
New drive clean
external drives have virus?
AVG got rid of one, other still infected
Currently running Avast Anti Virus and SUPERAntiSpyware

 

Has one of the AV's been removed? Not only will scans take forever, but they may miss viruses if you have more than one AV installed together and interfering with one another.

Can the external be repartitioned?