are reporting this. One of them said he had a bunch of MacBook users that caught something on limewire, and after nuking the drive, the drive still had obvious malware files still on it. They were looking at the drive with Linux LiveCDs. I ran onto this discussion on an article about firmware infected MacBooks. Some of them had been shipped with an infection in the keyboard controller - apparently. I don't remember if it was ZDNet or Tech Republic.

Same with Windows units - after nuking the drive the infection returns. Looking at the wiped drive later shows the malware files still on the drive. These folks were using Windows of all flavors, all the them had limeware on the machine before the disaster, they all tried at least reformatting, and at most DBAN to try to blow it away.

I've got to assume this is how the malware is accomplishing this. My clients won't bring them in for me to try something, they just throw the PC or hard drive away. I was hoping the factory original low level formatting would do the trick, as I think I cured at least one PC of this same problem. Only I didn't look at the drive with Knoppix like I usually would have, because I wasn't suspecting infection to cause the goofy drive tests I was getting.

I just assumed the newbie who installed the operating system on a amateur system build, had incorrectly set the drive geometry. After I worked it over it was fine and it is still operating - but I never looked at the drive before conditioning it with the factory disk utility. That incident was another P2P disaster.