Does this sound like a rootkit, or what?

My son's PC has developed a major problem... The BIOS is not detecting his hard drive or his CD-Rom.

When the system starts, it says something to the effect that "no hard drives were detected - hit F1 to continue or F2 to enter setup". I hit F2, entered the BIOS, set all drives to 'auto-detect' and rebooted, but the same thing happens again!​

So on the next reboot I hit F1 to continue and it finds and boots the C-drive (but the CD-R remains disabled) and seems to work ok... I checked Device Manager and there are no errors that I can see, but as before, the problem is there on every bootup!

This 'smells' like his system is infected, but a virus scan (from within Windows) reports "no malware found". I'd like to do a pre-boot scan, but as mentioned, his CD-R isn't being recognized...

What do you guy think?

 

Ron, if I'm not mistaken, while that app advises you as to what's on you system, it doesn't diagnose if it's working correctly.

 

I'd have to agree with Ron and also the folks @ the other Forum you posted to regarding hardware issue versus software. Many of the suggestions that have been suggested @ the BBR Forum should at least give you a good start before swamping you with other possibilities.

BBR thread for ref---> Is my son's PC infected, or what?

If available....have you temporarily replaced with a known good hard drive and\or CD drive. If symtoms are same I would be working backwards....meaning toward the IDE cable(seated properly), IDE conntroller\motherboard, bios.....etc....not toward the software side.

 

This could also be the controller going out. My mother's computer developed similar symptoms recently. I got her a new hard drive and gave her a brand new CD burner, and a couple weeks later everything but the new harddrive was toast (including the new burner). The first thing I would do would be to back up all your data. After that you might try whatever diagnostic tool the drive manufacturer makes, and maybe HD Tune, to see if you can see anything with the drive itself. The diagnostic tool from the manufacturer would be the first step (after backing up your data), some of them will tell you if something is wrong with the controller, then HD Tune will show you the S.M.A.R.T. info and allow you to do some tests. If you don't know what brand your drive is, HD Tune or Belarc should tell you. I would do this before putting any known good hardware in the system, if it is the controller you would risk damaging it. You might try putting the optical drive that's not working in another system, though. I also agree with Bubba about the cables, make sure they're all seated properly.

 

Thanks for the suggestions guys. My main objective in posting here was to get your take as to the likelihood of the system being infected.

Since no one seems to believe the symptoms are those of an infection, I'll pursue faulty hardware.