Hi;

Are you talking about 6 physical drives, or one or two partitioned into 6 'logical' drives? By logical drive I mean drive letter. Can you tell us the size of each physical drive installed and the size of each logical drive? It would also help to know what type of data is stored on each logical drive. Six physical hard disks installed on one machine would be pretty unusual to say the least.

Without that information I could offer the following general advice.

Without delay, back up everything irreplaceable to CD or whatever.

If something is flaky, everything on that physical drive is at risk, including any logical drives on that physical drive.

Watch your bootup for error messages, and monitor your event logs (Start, Run, eventvwr.msc, OK - then look at the system log) for a while.

It's unlikely that the virus is causing this problem, no virus can survive a formatting of the system drive containing the operating system, and it sounds like that's what you did.

Evaluate the type of software and data you have on the various drives. In general terms, I would be inclined to put the operating system and applications on the suspect physical drive and my data on safe physical drives until I was able to replace the physical drives.

It really depends on how critical the data is. You can rebuild your operating system drive in a couple of hours, but the final draft of your PhD thesis can't be replaced so easily. Find the money if your data is critical. Otherwise you can get along for the time being by being more frequent with backups.

By the way, I accept that money is tight, we've all been there, but watch the ads for major electronics chain stores, they sometimes offer door crasher specials that can make a new drive affordable. Some white-box computer retailers will also sell you a used drive which might be an option. Replace the suspect drive as soon as you can afford to.

Fill us in on the other info and we might be able to offer more specific advice.

Cheers,

Rob