Computer Issues Part III

Alright, so I think I know what's wrong now, in a general sense.

Let me explain further. My coworker had given me the suggestion that maybe just my C drive was corrupted, and I should reformat the second internal drive and install Windows XP on that. So on Monday night I booted from my disk, and reformatted both drives and installed Windows on the second internal drive (I call this my Storage Drive, as it usually has all my pictures, video and music on it). Well, it didn't work at all, in fact it was worse than the previous installations of Windows. I'm not sure why but maybe it was a Master/Slave issue? The C hard drive did have the boot priority (I had changed it in setup but it changed back).

So I wiped out the Windows install on the Storage Drive and re-installed it on the C drive. And it worked perfectly! I was so happy.....the internet was working, Windows looked like it should've looked, everything seemed fine. So I turned on my external hard drive (I had backed up everything from the second internal hard drive to this drive) as I normally keep it unplugged, and that's when I started getting errors, and issues, and Windows crashing and restarting. The internet started crashing and I would download files and they would be corrupted. So I think I have a virus as everything was fine until I turned on the External hard drive. Maybe it was the autoplay feature that released the virus.

Anyways, last night (Tuesday) I started Windows in safe mode with networking and tried to download antivirus software from the internet but they were all corrupted files. I also tried to run Trend Micro's Housecall (online virus and spyware scan) but it didn't work. So then I just turned on my external hard drive and copied and pasted various files into my second internal hard drive. In case I have to reformat my external hard drive, I wanted to save my pictures, music, saved game files, my Sims data, my bookmarks html file and other important documents. I didn't drag over any programs or .exe files.

Tonight when I get home, I will reformat my C drive again and install Windows XP and leave my external hard drive unplugged and turned off. If I still have issues, I will know that the external hard drive managed to infect the secondary hard drive, and I will reformat both internal drives. Then I will make sure Windows Update runs(another thing I wasn't able to do because of the issues) and my anti-virus is running and I have all my maintenance and cleaning tools downloaded from the internet, before I turn on the external hard drive and attempt to recover some of my data.

Wish me luck!