Unless the hard drive BIOS was in some way zapped I don't see how a hard
drive could be permanently damaged by software.
However a corrupt MBR or Partition table can wreak a lot of havoc and often
only be resolved by using a hard drive manufacture's utility to write zeros
to the drive. These utilities write 0s to the entire physical drive
removing all traces of everything and return the drive back to it's factory
condition. All the ones I have used employ testing and diagnostics that
will also check your drive for errors.
Make sure you use the hard drive manufacturers utility to do this.

Your problem really sounds like some kind of hardware failure with the MIDI
download just being coincidental. Try re-seating cables and cards. If that
doesn't help it is time to start swapping out components in a process of
elimination in order to determine the offender.

Mark Rode
The NoSpin Group

>Can an HD be damaged beyound repair by a virus. If
>yes, what are the symptoms?
>
>A PC I put together (Cyrex 333- WD68M HD) has major
>problems. It was working very well for about a year
>until I downloaded some MIDI software...this produced
>eratic behavior with error messages related to
>"Explorer".
>
>First I tried reinstalling win95...same results. Then
>installing a previous 586 MB...same. Both cases it
>would start up ok...then when I logged on errors would
>occur..."explorer bla,bla".
>
>I reformated the HD, reinstalled win 95, but results
>were only slightly better...eventually the same type
>errors would crop up.
>
>Your help will be greatly appreciated.

        The NOSPIN Group provides a monthly newsletter with great
       tips, information and ideas: NOSPIN-L, The NOSPIN Magazine
             Visit our web site to signup: http://nospin.com