DATA drive not able to be accessed

[goku2100]

I have norton antivirus 2003 installed on my system with the latest updates but have suspected for a while my system had a virus. The reason why I have suspected is because norton wouldn't run antivirus scans or acted funny in different ways. So one day I turn off my machine because I need to work on some one elses drive which I don't know if it too has a virus or not because it too has norton with latest definitions. So I boot with the drive as a slave and try out some recovery options and realize I can work on the drive fine.
So I insert my old drive back into the machine (I have a removable drive bay) and all of a sudden the drive is blank. Well I recently purchased a 160GB drive for this purpose of fixing the other drive which seems to be suffering the same problem as my drive is suffering. So I backup all my files to the new 160GB drive and restart the machine to do some tests on my old drive to see if it's dead or not. I test my old drive and decide to format it because it's working.

I then turn on my machine agian but this time the drive I backed up all my information from the old drive is now suffering the EXACT SAME PROBLEM as the original drive. So now I'm thinking that my drive is infected with a virus that ONLY attacks the data drives and have no idea what to do. Any ideas?
Thanks

 

[keith_b]

I work on machines and issues like this all the time, but I have never seen nor heard of any virus that has those specific effects. I honestly dont think its really possible....

Its more likely to be a funky hardware/setup issue. Try and put the "blank" drive in another machine as a secondary. See how it acts.

Also try running a couple other virus scanners. Norton is not very effective by itself sometimes.... try downloading Mcafee Stinger its a freebee....

http://vil.nai.com/vil/stinger/