Black Screen of Death ?

[galehickey]

Have XP w/512mb of mem using a PIII. Hard drive (80 gigs) is divided into c: (40gigs) and d: (40 gigs)for storage. System suddenly crashed and a Black Screen popped up with some mumbo jumbo about not being able to boot. Boot? Was running when this happened. Anyway, I done a scandisk and thought everything was ok until I went to open a file I keep in D: drive. Guess what - no D: drive. Went into My Computer and Windows Explorer. D: is gone. Used Partition Majic and guess what - C: is listed and the other 40 gigs are "unallocated". Checked System Restore and "all restore points are gone". What in the world could have wiped 40 gigs and the extended drive out? Thanks.

[TechKnickle]

It could very well be a virus. I know that there are viruses (however rare) that try and wipe out existing partitions. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. I don't know what other thing could have caused that and your restore points to be gone too... that's odd (unless you had system restore points on the D: drive). If the partition is gone, you're gonna have to make it again and format it, it's very hard to recover a partition deletion (i've never been successful unless the computer was not turned off).

But hey, Ima noob so just run the virus scan.

[gambler2611]

Are you using windows 98?

[galehickey]

Using XP w/PIII and 512 mb~
seen a lotts crazy stuff on pc's but this takes the cake. I could the entire HD going south but not a partition.