Please help me i have a question, and my wife might kill me

Tobobo · 8 Sept 2008, 18:43

Hi everyone,

Recently my wife's computer picked up a virus and it killed it. Now the local PC World refused to fix it saying that the motherboard was shot. I'm more inclined to say that its the virus mucking up the boot procedures. Now I have a second PC which I'm now using. but i want the data of the other computer.

So here is the question:

Can i plug the hard drive from my wife's PC into the second PC as a slave drive then scan for the virus and then take the data i want of it?

Thanks in advance

pilou · 8 Sept 2008, 19:09

Bloody mess, you're screwed!

No...sorry...I don't know, maybe someone will find a little trick for save your life!

drewpoeppel · 8 Sept 2008, 19:47

Yes you can do that. Also you can try booting that hard drive up as the Master on the working computer and see if you have the same problem on both computers. If not they might be right and you got a bad motherboard. A new HD cost less than a new PC. I've never heard of a virus messing up your "boot" just the hard drive.

solo · 8 Sept 2008, 19:54

To be safe I would get an external HD case and plug it in as USB or SATA instead of using the internal IDE slave method. Then using your virus protection do a full scan including the new 'E' drive (or whatever letter it gets assigned) before exploring it.

juju · 8 Sept 2008, 20:34

DON'T plug in the HDD as the master boot HDD, you can use it as a slave drive though. The only time you could use the same drive in a different machine (as a master boot drive) is when the motherboards are exactly the same, else you're going to get all kinds of strange messages and risk corrupting it.

Tobobo · 9 Sept 2008, 07:24

Wow!
What a quick response!

Thanks guys.

I will try the external method first and see if it works

Thanks very much