Possible boot sector virus

Firstly, hello everyone. I hope that I am posting this in the correct place.

I have a Samsung SP2004 200G Hard drive that I believe may have a boot sector virus. OS is XP Pro. Before it refused to boot, Chkdsk would only run part of the 2nd operation (i.e part 2 of 3), before saying it had encountered "An unknown error", always in the same place.

The other day I had to turn off the computer, on starting up again, it refuses to boot. The blue bar scrolls across the screen on startup, stalls, continues, stalls etc ad infinitum.

I am currently using my 2nd drive, which was the slave drive. I cannot boot from this drive (A maxtor, when the Samsung is plugged into the machine, the blue bar scrolls and stalls as before).

When the Samsung drive is unplugged my 2nd drive boots fine.

I have downloaded various repair programs to create rescue boot disks but the floppy drive fails to recognise that there is a floppy inserted, yet if I put a known floppy in with a game on for instance, I can click properties and it will tell me all the usual information about the floppy. I have tried a number of floppys in the A: drive.

If I try to repair with the XP disk, I get to "Loding kernel debugger Dll files" and it stalls. I do not believe that the disk is dead, but I think it's a very nasty virus. I would like to try everything to recover any data before a reformat and fresh install of XP.

If you can help in any way, I would be most grateful.

Thanks in advance.

Keith

Possible boot sector virus - Please Help