I have a Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm, SATA 200 GB hard disk, which I recently converted into a portable one by using one of those USB aluminum casings. Everything was working fine until I copied some files from my friends computer, when a virus also lodged itself on my harddisk.

Now whenever I connected my harddisk to my laptop, the data was accessible but it always tried to autorun a program but thankfully my antivirus (Bitdefender V10) always stopped it from doing so. One day I did a virus check on the harddisk using the same antivirus, It found a virus in one of the files but could not repair it so I deleted the file. From that day on I am not able to access any data on my harddisk. Whenever I connect it to my laptop, the harddisk is detected and I know this by:

1) The eject icon in the status bar
2) It lists the harddisk in the device manager
3) It also shows the harddisk on the BIOS settings menu at startup.

But the hard disk is not displayed in the explorer neither in DOS. THERE IS AN OCCASIONAL BLIP-BLIP SOUND THAT COMES FROM THE HARDDISK AND THAT'S IT. and there are two continuous blips at a time.

Also this harddisk does not have any OS on it and it has four equal partitions.

Please help me out........... preferably without formatting the harddisk.

Dear vchaz,first of all,welcome to the PCQuest bulletin boards.
Now,it would help a lot if we know what was the name of the file which you had to delete since cleaning was not possible.
Yours faith-fully,

Use any Live Linux OS (use knoppix/Ubuntu) to boot ur PC while the External HDD is connected, It should detect the HDD.
You may be able to see the partitions on the External HDD & you can copy data from this one to your Host HDD.

What if uou didn't see the partitions ??
force mount !!!!!!

open the terminal, do > "fdisk -l" this will list all the partitions on your system 1st sata disk(ur host hdd should be sda, ur extarnal hdd should be sdb ETC)
Mount the 1st partitions from external hdd to a folder (use /misc or create a new folder) > "mount /dev/sda1 /misc" or u may need to use "mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda1 /misc"

now you can access your files from "/misc" folder.

--keep me posted (also mail - debapriya.biswas@gmail.com)

formaating would be needed man

In a fresh windows machine, Install a antivirus and Use tweakUI (Freeware) to
1. make autorun disable of every drive.
2. Go to Explorer, Select tools, folder options, view.
3. Check show hidden files and folders.
4. Uncheck hide extentions for known files, and hide protected operating systems files.
5. To take extra safety, make folder to your all HDD named "Autorun.inf"
6. Connect the USB HDD.
7. Antivirus must delete the viruses from HDD.
8. Else use Win+E to explore Disk view, Select view details.
9. Open the autorun.inf file in USBHDD using notepad.
10. Check the .exe fired in the .inf file.
11. Delete the file first, and autorun file too.
12. Dont double click any folder to see it's content. It may be .EXE with icon of folder.
13. You can easily realise this as extention view is on. Delete all this EXEs.
14. Now unhide the hidden (Dimmed) folders.
15. Alternatively ur Antivirus must delete all the infected files before accessing them.

here I give a mix of manually retrive data. But, if ur data contained executable program. better delete and recompile from source code. Generally source code files are not affected by virus.

for extra precaution I recomend to make "Autorun.inf" folder creation in drives so that same file cannot be created by any program. Moreover disabling autorun gives extra safety.

Hope this helps the forum members.

Linux is nice but I dont prefer to use text command advices to newbie.

This is why I dont like linuxguru with commandonly advice.

There is tool available on seagate website named seatools.Just download it and burn it to CD or use in windows.If test in it fails your hard disk can be replaced.just google seatools