MicroPilot
Veteran Member
Hard drive churning is not a common symptom of malware infestation. My first thought would be imminent hard drive failure. My first step would be to verify the hard drive is working correctly by booting into the BIOS and check to see if there are some hard drive diagnostics built in. Most PC's usually also have some kind of restore or diagnostics partition that can be booted to to run diagnostics.
If it some kind of malware infestation, it can be very tough to get rid of. There is almost no 100% chance of being certain all threats have been eliminated. The only way to be 100% sure the PC is not compromised is to reformat the hard drive.
First step to take once you think a virus has taken control of your machine is to run scans on the hard drive without booting from it. There are several ways to do this. I usually use Aviras Rescue CD. Download the image from here: Avira AntiVir Rescue System - Download and choose the 2nd file for download, the .exe. Best practice is to use a second computer to create a CD using this download. Then boot the suspect computer using this newly created CD. It is a standalone virus scanning system.
Another tool to use to isolate the suspect hard drive is one of the many "Live" CD's for Linux distributions. I recommend Ubuntu. Using this CD you can access the problem PC's hard drive and be able to run diagnostic, edit files and most important copy off files that you want to save with reduced chance of transferring the malware also. Again you'll likely need to use a 2nd PC to create this CD.
Once you have some control back on the suspect PC I recommend running full scans with your anti-virus system Malwarebytes, super anti-spyware, IOBits Malware Fighter. Be aware that all this will take many hours to complete.
If it some kind of malware infestation, it can be very tough to get rid of. There is almost no 100% chance of being certain all threats have been eliminated. The only way to be 100% sure the PC is not compromised is to reformat the hard drive.
First step to take once you think a virus has taken control of your machine is to run scans on the hard drive without booting from it. There are several ways to do this. I usually use Aviras Rescue CD. Download the image from here: Avira AntiVir Rescue System - Download and choose the 2nd file for download, the .exe. Best practice is to use a second computer to create a CD using this download. Then boot the suspect computer using this newly created CD. It is a standalone virus scanning system.
Another tool to use to isolate the suspect hard drive is one of the many "Live" CD's for Linux distributions. I recommend Ubuntu. Using this CD you can access the problem PC's hard drive and be able to run diagnostic, edit files and most important copy off files that you want to save with reduced chance of transferring the malware also. Again you'll likely need to use a 2nd PC to create this CD.
Once you have some control back on the suspect PC I recommend running full scans with your anti-virus system Malwarebytes, super anti-spyware, IOBits Malware Fighter. Be aware that all this will take many hours to complete.