Needing a bit of advice and I am not hugely computer literate. Well, better than my parents - but that's about it. I promise this isn't about viruses - it's about a hard drive.
Ok, so my computer got a virus. By running McAffee it seemed to cause an error in XP and, although the computer would start, only the wall-paper would load up. There was no desktop icon, no toolbar, nothing at all. I could access task manager and worked out that all my files were still there, but it wouldn't run programs and it wouldn't let me export the files to my usb key or burn a cd with them on it. Was able to get a few out on a floppy-disk, but didn't have enough to export everything I needed.
Then my boyfriend took over and decided to connect my hard drive as a slave drive to his spare computer. But he messed it up and connected them both as primary drives. Since then, the virus drive has not been recognised by the computer, although the other one has been.
I put the hard drive in to a shop and have had all the files exported - so I have my data. But they aren't able to reformat the drive, saying that their computer isn't even recognising the drive anymore.
So, is there anything I can do? I know it seems stupid asking this after I've put it in a shop, but really - their knowledge is worse than mine. It took them a week to transfer files to a dvd!
so my question is - how do you reformat a drive that's not being recognised?
if you've read this far - you're a star