Will a HD reformat kill ALL viruses?

[Tim]

I've got problems with this damn about:blank spyware, and nothing has been able to fix it. I was thinking of doing reformats and XP Home reinstalls on both hard drives (a 20 GB and an 80 GB Seagate Barracuda) and reloading everything. All important files will either be burned to CD or traded between the drives during the reformats / reinstalls.

Just want to hear some thoughts on if one of these spywares can survive a reformat or be hiding in a file somewhere and restart the whole process once I fix it.

I was thinking of doing this anyhow, as my HDs seem to have a lot of wasted space on them now anyhow.

[Tex]

If your copying all teh data back and forth and you don't know how to get rid of the about:blank thing then how can you be sure your not copying it back and forth with all the files you are trying to save would be my question?

about:blank isn't a virus so you should be OK if your careful. If it was a true virus I would say you were going through the whole reload for nothing as you would be copying the infected files back and forth. Have you posted the hijack logs and had the experts here try and help you?

Tex

[csimon]

try it and see tim ...actually it should take care of the spyware but not most viruses. Some viruses stealth themselves into the boot sector and ram.

[Straight_Man]

I've got problems with this damn about:blank spyware, and nothing has been able to fix it. I was thinking of doing reformats and XP Home reinstalls on both hard drives (a 20 GB and an 80 GB Seagate Barracuda) and reloading everything. All important files will either be burned to CD or traded between the drives during the reformats / reinstalls.

Just want to hear some thoughts on if one of these spywares can survive a reformat or be hiding in a file somewhere and restart the whole process once I fix it.

I was thinking of doing this anyhow, as my HDs seem to have a lot of wasted space on them now anyhow.

Tim, I do the opposite by choice, I burn off and archive what I have scanned and checked for viruses, as far as old data, then run defrag and CHKDSK on XP, and get rid of old backups also. Then I get my wasted space back.

AQ lot of adware, trojan stuff, worms, spyware, etc., comes in through IE, but if you restore all settings from old XP home instanse, you have registry hooks there to anything not killed, so if you manage to get the files recopied over or transferred also, the junk will carry forward into new instance of IE.

So, literal answer is, yes, if not careful to exclude the junk and the registry hooks used, transferring over can indeed move your junk right back into your new install.

BTW, for those wondering about a viral thing in boot sector, answer is to zero pack HD with utils provided by mfr of your HD for your HD. When that is done, not only no data, but no boot sector reamins, it all has been written over with zeros except for sector markers. No partition table exists either. I do this from a write-protected floppy COLD boot (so no viruses hop onto floppy, then back into computer RAM and possibly eventually onto HD on another computer or same computer when floppy is used later to check HD), do not save a log, but DO write down any errors carefully if drive is under warranty.

Anything you have not backed up will be lost this way, absent very expensive work to read the data under the zeros as residual mag layer records on HD. You might be out 3-4 thousand dollars US for a 100 GB HD recovery (normal bill for this is above $100.00 per bench hour), if you never wrote anything after the zero-pack, to get some (recovery is normally NOT warranteed) of your old data back. But viruses cannot run from overwritten residual mag layers, and XP does not know how to access them either.

[Tim]

I've got a good idea of what site it came from. Not Kazaa, but a site with videos on it.

I just posted a seperate topic with the hijack this log files.

[Tex]

The guys here at this site are as good as they get for web support on these matters. I mean that BIG time! Feel VERY very lucky as this quality of support would cost you a $100 an hour most places and you get it through the wonder of trhe internet for free.

God bless short-media and the guru's here that so openly give of their time to solve these problems for free. These are very special people. They do not get the appreciation they deserve. These days the adware and spyware are causing even more probs for the common user then virus's.

They have both my respect and admiration always.

Cheers

Tex

[h2os]

I had the about:blank problem and nothing worked. I tried Panda Titanium 2004 Anti Virus Software at www.pandasoftware.com and it worked! You get a free trial for a month, go for it

[Dexter]

There are easy ways to get rid of this for free. However, having some sort of anti-virus program is important. For numerous anti-virus recommendations, see this post in our General Security Forum: http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12261

Dexter...