Computer wiping out my hard-drives?

[neoshinzo]

I was running Windows XP on a Dell Dimension 4400 Pentium 4 and I've been scanning my computer regularly with AVG 8.0 and Ad-Aware until yesterday, with no problems.

My computer just became very slow, and then I noticed my slave drive just disappeared from My Computer. I tried to restart my computer but it would boot anymore saying no OS or boot failure.

I took a hard drive from another computer and tried it on mine and it wouldn't boot that one either, then I put it back in its original computer and now that hard drive won't boot anymore. It says no OS found.

I tried to boot the Windows CD and it gets stuck at Starting Windows. I'm just wondering if this is a virus or some other problem with my computer that's corrupting all the hard-drives.

Thanks in advance.

[c#4p0]

I would check the systems hardware starting with motherboard and memory. Run some diagnostics on the machine and confirm that it is not the hardware.

[patio]

You cannot simply take a HDD from one machine and swap it in to another and expect it to boot properly...
This has been true since WinME.
Also it's a terrible way to diagnose what's wrong with a system...
Post alot more info on the machine and what happened prior to this and someone will be along shortly...

[c#4p0]

All that patio described is correct but if you are going to rule out the hardware such as memory, processor, motherboard etc. with diagnostic testing it does not matter what drive you have in place even though it would be smart to have the one you started with in the machine since that is the harddrive that you use for that system, but bootable diagnostics don't know the difference you are simply testing all hardware out with stress test and other test