I left the computer for about a half an hour, and when I returned, there was a black screen with white text. It has a bunch of system info and then at the bottom it says:
Pri Master Hard Disk: S.M.A.R.T. STATUS BAD, Back up and replace
Press to run SETUP.

I've tried escape and turning on and off. This just appeared from nowhere. I had notice slow performance recently and had run several scans, but nothing major came up. I felt there was still a VIRUS and was going to back up my thousands of photos, which I fear now I may have lost.

Help!!!!
ThanksBasically, SMART is a hard drive self-test that detects the 'health' of the hard drive. What your computer is saying, is that your hard drive has died and needs replacing. If at all possible, you should slave the drive to get all of your data off of it, and replace.

The drive was getting slower not from a virus, but because of the fact it was failing. It had to READ the same information over and over to retrieve the data it wants to read. If it fails to read the information altogether it will generate an error. A slow computer should ALWAYS be investigated - they don't slow down for no reason!

If you're lucky, the drive might not have died completely, and your data will be recoverable when you slave the drive.

If you definitely NEED those photos, and slaving the drive does not work, you can try a data recovery service which will retrieve data from dead hard drives. ONE example of such a service is OnTrack but there are many more. Please note however, this is a very expensive service. Expect it to be in the 500+ dollar range.Hurry take the hard drive out and put it in the freezer. There may not be much time. Be careful with it. Put it in a ziplock baggie of some sort. HURRYY!! Your time is limited. When was the last time you blew your computer out with a can of compressed air?