Will a HD reformat kill ALL viruses?
Tim
Southwest PA Icrontian
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.
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.
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Comments
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
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.
I just posted a seperate topic with the hijack this log files.
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
Dexter...