>Said he took the HD out to test it and it froze his diagnostic test kit/tool. hmm, if drive is dead then it's just not visible to the system, the main PC will boot regardless. The cabling is independent of the rest of the system so a dead SATA interface would not cause any problems. A theoretical short might, but a PSU would burn out any short. The BSOD code would have been useful to determine why it's not booting some need an AHCI driver loaded, you can bypass this by hot plugging or using a different SATA port (or a separate PCI SATA card) it could have a corrupted MBR it could have a non responsive controller which will stop the boot it could be seeing bad sectors and looping trying to read them then aborting What makes you believe a virus caused this and not say just a dying drive? . Ask the techie to put it into a USB drive caddy and see if that makes it readable, it's an abstraction from the SATA interface An SSHD isn't nearly as fast as a SSD. I think I have one in a PC somewhere, it's just a HD really