Windows XP Removed hard drive to get Viruses and Spyware off

[JB Compute]

Hi all,

I was trying to fix my friends laptop as she said it was very slow (well that was an understatement).

The Antivirus was out of date and with the computer being so slow, I took the hard drive out to attach to my computer to scan with AVG and Malwarebytes, hoping it would speed it up a bit. After running these scans I also did a Disk cleanup, error checking and disk defrag while still connected to my computer.

When I put in the hard drive, i get an error message saying no operating system black screen. When I go into the BIOS the hard drive is not listed.

There is no option in the BIOS to auto-detect hard drives.

The operating system is definitely on the hard drive as I have checked.

Has anyone ever had this problem after taking out a hard drive, as now my friends computer is not working at all.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Abarbarian]

Could be a corupted MBR but that is only a guess. Or it mat just need re-seating but thats doubtful.

You should be able to tell if anything else has gone wrong with the laptop by running a Live Linux CD, That should run without needing a HDD. If it runs then you have the problem isolated to the HDD.

If you can not sort the drive you can use the Linux Live CD to recover important files and folders before you do a re-install.