How Did This Happen? Help?

[bounda 0]

I used to be paranoid about viruses, protecting myself from them and such. My trial subscription to mcafee had just ended (your probably thinking McAfee? WTF?) and i needed new antivirus. I am on cable, but to be able to buy the computer im using now for so cheap, i had to pay for AOL for one year. I decided that because of this, i might as well try their antivirus that comes with mcafee free of charge. I downloaded it and installed it. I immediately noticed a slowdown in my systems speed, but thought nothing of it because it usually happens when you only have 256 megabytes of ram. After installing and updating the virus database i began scanning. I went outside knowing it would take a while. When i came back in, the computer had a blue screen saying something about an error or something, i cannot remember well. I held the turn on button to turn it off, and then rebooted. When i rebooted, my computer took ages to start up, over 10 times as long as normal. At first i concluded that i mustve had a virus, but i had not been to any porn sites or have not been downloading anything. I had only been to trusted sites, which i knew, would never screw me over. After everything had booted up, i tried uninstalling the antivirus, which i also thought may be the problem, but the start menu took too long to open, and the uninstall file would not run. I knew if i got my parents into this, i would get into even more trouble. Finally, after many attempts, the program uninstalled. I rebooted hoping the lag would disappear, but this time, instead of booting, I got this message 'Please insert disk to boot from.... No disk found.. Loading operating system... No operating system found, or it is corrupt.' When this happened, i thought i would never have to resort to this, but to keep myself from getting in trouble and my parents figuring out, i restarted the computer with my windows operating system disk. I tryed repairing at first, but nothing happened, so then i attempted a fresh install. I wiped my partitions clean, and then the disk began moving files over, when it was done it automatically restarted the computer. This time the o/s loaded and i got to the XP install screen. As everything installed, i sat by my computer hoping it would work. After installed, windows booted up and i installed my wireless adapter drivers for internet first to try to figure out what my problem was. When it was finally installed, i ran IE so i could get firefox. I then ran firefox and began searching at my computer's support site. i found nothing on this sort of case, i also noticed that when i scrolled on any site, the refresh rate was slow. I turned off my computer, waiting till morning to find a new antivirus to install. When i restarted my computer, i got the 'Corrupted operating system' message again. I franticly searched for my xp install disc and attempted one more install. This time, it wouldnt work, i would get 'Could not detect disk drive' and other errors. I read everything i could, but could not get the answer. While i was trying to fix it, my brother discovered i was having a problem, he turned on my computer and it wouldnt load. he went to my parents and told.I got yelled at, then we sent the computer into the company, it turned out to have a corrupted hard drive. When it returned, i somehow got grounded from the computer for doing something stupid. (not the computer problem) but when we loaded it up, finally, IT WOULDNT WORK!! we called up tech support and they told us to try taking out the ram, puttin it back in, and making sure all the ribbon cables were connected correctly. *Click*Windows XP Loading.... =D IT FINALLY WORKED!Please, help figure out what happened to my computer, it is still taunting me, i dont know whether it was my fault, the antivirus, or possibly my brother Razz this took a long time to write, and i do not want to have written it for nothing lol.This happened several months ago

Edited July 21, 2006 by bounda (see edit history)

[HarrisonHopkins 0]

Sounds to me like it was just a defective hard disk. No problem there except with the maker of it.

[bounda 0]

.. are you sure, ive heard many complaints about aol being spyware and such..

[HarrisonHopkins 0]

AOL is pretty much crap, but because you said that you reinstalled Windows, and it did it again quite soon, that is what lead me to believe that the problem was manufacturing, not a virus.My dad has AOL, and he has had no problems at all with it, so no, AOL isn't what messed up your computer.

Edited July 21, 2006 by HarrisonHopkins (see edit history)

[ZPGames 0]

Besides AOL being such a multi-national conglormorate, if it was spyware it would have been shut down at atleast 2.0. They would'nt have made it to whatever number they're up to 10.0 or something.

[kawasu 0]

this definately sounds like a hardware problem. a similar scenario happened to me a few years back. i think its triggered by a virus and slowly damages your harddrive there after. the virus changes the writing sectors of the harddisks and corrupts vital areas which then leads to not being able to access or write to parts of it. the more you try to write to these areas the bigger the damaged areas get and sooner or later you wont be able to read from the harddrive at all. formatting worked the first tfew tiems, but then my hdd totally buggered and i couldnt even read from it. i ended up changing the hdd to fix the problem.

[Bkag 0]

Same thing excactely just happened to me, dell sent a new hard drive and i re installed windows and now everything is fine.

[jimhap 0]

I had Windows 95, and it said Couldn't Find HD!!!i reconnected it, tighntened everything, and tried again. It still has the error......it was the HD problem! As for you, it was hard to see if it was the HD....