Virus on Extreme USB Hard Drive

I am not sure what your problem is.

Do you think you have a virus affecting your Hard Drive itself or a virus affecting the driver for a USB hard drive?

Have you run an antivirus software and identified you have a virus? If so what is the virus and why couldn't the antivirus software remove it?


What operating system are you using?
Is the USB hard drive formatted for the operating system you are using?
Have you been able to use the USB drive on this system before?
Can you use the USB hard drive on another system?

I am using Windows XP.
Yes, the USB was formatted in the beginning, before I started to use and it was more than 1 year ago.
I have used this HDD, till yesterday evening.
I can use the USB in any system, and I have used it.

The problem is: The PC recognize the USB, but I can not open to use it, as I used so far.

Ok let's try it this way:

What evidence do you have that there is a virus in the driver? I suspect none, which would make it possible that you don't even have a virus and that trying to help you remove a non-existent virus would be a difficult task.

What you describe sounds more like the disc failing than a virus, but it's hard to even begin to help you because what you report sounds like it may be very wild speculation.

If you do know that it's a virus, what virus is it? How do you know? Those clues will help others answer the question.

Note: if the disc died you are out of luck and hopefully have backup. Otherwise data recovery off the disc will be costly and difficult.

Robert Gentel...

You might not quiet understand me, because I'm not so good in English.

I will try to explain...

The USB works, but I can't see what is in it. ( I mean I can not open folders ) to use it. Otherwise on the Properties I can see the Disk Space.

When I stick it to another PC it works, but not on my LAP TOP.

I don't know what kind of virus infected it, but the last time, it means last night I saw just NEW FOLDER. I deleted it, and then when I swithced off my USB, I wasn't able to use it anymore.

So, the PC can read the USB, but I can't use music or other stuff which is on it. I think the "NEW FOLDER" that was in it, might be any kind of Virus

It sounds like one of 2 problems
The USB driver in XP has become corrupted
The USB drive has failed in some way.


Have you used the drive on another system since it failed on this one? If it works on another system then the problem is likely the XP USB driver.

Have you used another USB drive on this system? If another drive does work then it is likely the USB drive itself.

If you track it down to the drive then it could be the hard drive itself or it could just be the USB/IDE converter in the case. If it is the case it is fairly easy to fix by just putting the drive in a new case. If it is the IDE drive itself that has failed then it can be salvaged but may take some work depending on what the failure is.

A couple of more questions. Is the USB drive one that requires power and if so does the power light come on. When the power light comes on does the drive light come on as well? Do you hear the drive power up and start spinning? If it is a 3.5" USB drive then it could be one that uses the USB power from the computers USB to power the drive. Sometimes the computer won't provide enough power so try a different USB connection on the computer or connect it to a powered hub.

If it was me and the USB drive's power light doesn't come on, I would remove the drive from the case, open my computer and connect the drive directly to an IDE cable and start the computer to see if the drive works that way.

Whatever you do, don't reformat the drive if you want to save files. There are a lot of programs out there these days that are not too expensive that can search damaged drives as long as the drive spins.