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Getting a New Hard Drive

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13 replies

by rejette

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My windows 98 has been infected with a virus of some kind. Various open envelopes appear on my desktop, and in other programs ie word, excel, etc. I don't know what caused it; but I'm told is a virus. I'm considering a new hard drive. Would thisget rid of this problem if I get a new hard drive and load Win2000 OS on it?

13 replies

by cg it

depends on where the virus is. Could be residing in the BIOS or memory. Best bet is to run a virus scan than buy a hard drive. [much cheaper to].

by b_pope

Bios viruses are pretty rare anymore & running a virus scan will almost always rid you of them & most other viruses also. Reformatting would be better than buying a new hard drive if you can't rid yourself of the virus.

by ckaylam

suggestion solution to your case
1)go to http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
or other free online scan website to elminiate all the virus from your system.

2)Remove the infected harddisk, install the new harddisk and W2K and then plug in the infected harddisk and run virus scan

by kishorebkvr

Dear friend,
Most probably its a Nimda virus i mean whenever u create a newfolder or u open an existing folder
ur going to see a white colour envelope u right click on the envolope ur going to see the extension .eml better u go to symantec website and search nimda virus removal tools they are free for download u copy the file and exectue from dos it may be somewhat like w32.nimda..and so on..
hope u could get rid of this problem.

by rejette

This is the answer that pointed me in the best direction to get rid of this Nimda virus. Seemed as if they really understood what was going on. I was able to get rid of this virus and purchased McAfee Virus Scan and am now protected. Thanks!

by 7nt

Getting a new hard disk will not solve your problem, unless you intend to reinstall all your programs from scratch, in which case you may as well reformat your current hard drive. If you wanted to copy your folders over from the old hard disk, then the chances are that the virus would also be copied over with them.

You need to address the virus on your hard drive and get rid of that first. I recommend getting F-Prot, which runs from DOS. What I do is burn it to a CD, and boot the machine with a Windows 98 startup disk. However if you don't have a writer, download and unzip the file on another computer and just copy what fits on one floppy, make note of the file you left off at and copy the rest to another floppy. Copy all the files to adirectory on the PC you need to scan.

http://www.f-prot.com/download/getfpdosfree.html

Using the CD is the ideal solution as the virus can't attack a CD and infect it (whereas it can if you run it from a floppy or your hard drive).

Once thevirus is gone, you can then upgrade to 2000 or whatever you wish.

clover

by grey_woolf

Buy Norton Anti-virus for your OS.
Boot from NAV CD-ROM.
Follow prompts.
Install NAV.
Connect to Internet.
Activate NAV.
Activate "LiveUpdate."

Update atleast once a week.

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