unrecognized SATA hard drive

[Donald]

Someone asked me to look at their Acer laptop (Win 7) that was getting all kinds of pop-up ads, etc.

I prefer to run the AV and malware scan on my laptop.

So I pulled the harddrive and attached it to my IDE/SATA harddrive to USB adapter and it shows as G drive but wants me to format it as it cannot recognize the file system. Tried it on Win 8.1 system also, same result. I have used the adapter on various other harddrives and its always worked.

 

[simple_gifts]

Did you try running fdisk to see what it thinks is there?

 

[punisher]

Does the original Laptop still recognize/boot from the drive?

 

[rjundi]

I find my USB adapter is hit or miss on working properly with other computers drives. If I plug harddrive in directly or use my Thinkpad cadddy instead of the DVD drive it works.

 

[Smcatub]

If you can't get it running outside of the laptop, you could use a bootable AV on a minimal Linux distro. Like Kaspersky Rescue CD

 

[Donald]

The drive works fine in the original laptop. With ESET and Malwarebytes I was able to clean it up. Some malware had also set a proxy in IE and Firefox.

I am thinking my drive to USB adapter might be the issue.