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permenately deleting information

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I have an UBER annoying virus on my pc that I haven’t been able to chase down. I want to completely erase all content on hard drive and at the same time giving it optimal oppertunity to be used again. What is the best way to go about this?

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In reply to permenately deleting information

If you want to completely erase a drive, Darik’s Boot and Nuke is a good choice (link below). Most drive manufacturers supply diagnostic software that will reset drive to factory state.

Both are good choices and run from bootable floppy disk which doesn’t allow virus to load unless BIOS is infected.

Should be obvious but worth saying, download software and create disks on another PC that is virus free.

http://dban.sourceforge.net/

Dalton

Reply To: permenately deleting information

In reply to permenately deleting information

As stated use a boot disk to clear your drive or install fresh with your windows cd..

Since you didn’t specify which OS you have you should use your windows cd..

On the second note if you use your cd it won’t matter much about the contents of the drive as you will do a total erasure at that time..

IF you have to use a boot floppy you can go to

http://www.bootdisk.com to obtain for any OS

You will want to save your files and do a backup before you do a total rebuild. Make sure you don’t reintroduce the virus when you move your files back to the new machine… Typically user files don’t have the virus, but you should be aware that some do ..
If you go to http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

I have had great success doing it this way where other virus scanners locally installed fail.. This is due to the viruses ability to disable/incompactitate locally installed virus scanners..

Good Luck

Reply To: permenately deleting information

In reply to permenately deleting information

A couple of suggestions.
1. Go to the drive manufacturers website and download a low-level format utility (if they supply one freely) and use it.
2a. Boot from your Windows CD and partition/format/install
or
2b. Boot from a floppy (available from http://www.bootdisk.com) and partition your drive.
3. Re-boot from floppy and high-level format your drive.
Sometimes a virus will live in the master boot record. You can over-write this record by booting from floppy and executing fdisk/mbr from the dos prompt.

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