Disk management not showing any HD partitions

set to defaults as mentioned in first post but will go through them one by one. It's my wife's laptop and she's not inclined to even peek under the hood. I do the maintenance and full system backups but my tinkering is limited to deciding which startup items are absolutely necessary. The mentioned processes had been working but I can't say how long ago since I've run the chkdsk variations. There have been some slow startup/shutdown issues. I'd have to admit that, between what Lenovo wants to load and what my wife installs, the system tray would take up 2 or three rows at the bottom if not kept under control.

Try it in safe mode then if that fails look for any cd or dvd emulators and toss those out. Retest and then toss out any Nero InCD, Roxio DirectCD or similar, retest and finally toos out the usual upper and lowerfilter entries you find with cd/dvd media as a drive letter entries and reboot, retest safe mode.

That's about all I've ever had to do save re-register dlls. Here's a note on that -> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/831430

Neither chkdsk /f, defrag or disk management work in safe or normal mode. None of the mentioned suspects are installed on the laptop. I've been all over google and have found dozens with the same or similar issues and tried everything within reason before posting here. I may be left with a repair installation but there's no XP full installation boot disk for this one. All I've got is the PID code and what I've burned to DVD. My wife may need to live with it. It's nothing she'd even notice unless the problem escalated into something worse. She's a school tech coordinator and uses the laptop to connect to a variety of teaching and multimedia devices, "smart" boards etc., ...some of which require software that runs services and loads up the system tray. Most of these will launch manually on demand anyway. I believe this is what's causing her occasional shutdown problems where she holds down the power button as a last resort. The thing is bilingual too....speaks Chinese and English. While loading a new Nvidia driver yesterday, installation suddenly changed to Chinese characters. Trying to figure out which button to click on...or how to back out...was a fun time.

When I can't run chkdsk then I know that something horrible has occurred.
Bob

and I disabled it altogether after reading some horror stories about BIOS upgrades gone sour if the chip was enabled and a boot password had been set. There are reset instructions that require creating some sort of disk in advance of monkeying around with it but most will probably find out when they've already experienced the worst. One BIOS requirement I'd forgotten about when trying to run the recovery console from an XP boot disk was the need to change from SATA enhanced mode to PATA compatibility. I was able to run the chkdsk utility from there but nothing was noted. By then, I'd already cloned the 100 gig to a 250 so the old disk is sitting aside for insurance purposes. I'm less concerned about the few utilities that I've found not working than those I've not yet found. It's not my laptop and it won't bite me...but it's owner just might.

Dude..... thank you.

I joined the forums just to express my thanks to you. I don't know how this crap got on my machine, but your solution was awesome. I had the exact same problem.

We need more people like you in the world.
- your good in my books

Thanks for your note -- much appreciated!

I worked 4 days to hunt the ****** down and was about to give up when I found the McAfee program. I noticed a fair number of posts with the same symptoms, but nobody had a clue about the cause. So, I just wanted to spare somebody else the pain I went through. Although, I'd like to inflict a lot of pain on the miscreant who wrote the virus.

I was having the exact same issues you described on a post-virus laptop. I was going nutz trying to figure this one out and had finally settled on rebuilding because I was out of ideas and none of the forums I've tried seemed to have any solutions. You saved me a lot of headache and with the type of day I'm having today...I just can't thank you enough. You have no idea how many people you probably have helped today just by taking the time to post this solution. You rock out loud.

i also wanted to thank you. i spent all day trying to figure this out, and finally came across your post and was able to fix it. THANK YOU!

Thanks for the nice comments. Glad someone found the post helpful.

Now, if I could just solve the "W32/Virut.gen" infection I recently acquired (the new variant that also infects html files with an iframe link to a malware site)....

As it is, I'm seriously thinking of switching to a Mac.

Thanks for pointing out the pests!

Disk management not showing any HD partitions
I am using windows xp operating system.& had encountered this problem
I had scan all the processes using McAfee Rootkit Detective Version 1.1 and also Rootkit Removal unhack me software http://safecomputing.umn.edu/guides/scan_unhackme.html
but does not find any trojan / rootkit virus.....or any hidden file
& also scanned my computer with malwarebytes(antimalware) ..but no malware was found....
also i want to mention that a few days ago being a user of online avast antivirus.......avast had scanned a trojan/rootkit virus which i then deleted from the computer....but not showing the disk partition make me feels that there may be a malware/trojan in my computer ......but i can't figured it out
whenever i go to my computer >> right click >> manage >> Storage>> Disk management..... i only see complete blank for all drives except cd rom...
please help me out .....is this problem very serious??
should i reinstall operating system...??
as i don't want to reinstall operating system ...help me out to debug this problem......
thanx in advance

thanks a lot HELL dude!!!

i just joined here to say thanks to you!!!

was having this problem , dont know since when, realised when i sat down for installing a fresh w7 and there were no DRIVES!!
how cud it be...!
then searched the net and found ur solution here and on some other forum too (by you only dont remember the name)

but the major problem was getting the right rootkit remover..

Mc Afee : was not compatible for my W7 ultimate

SOPHOS : in the first run found a registry + 10-12 programs , and in the display was recommnding not to remov them...was taking 30+ mins but my PC crashed

finally fsecure's "TDSSKiller.exe" worked in 30 secs all fine...

thanks a lot!