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VBS Virus Problem

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by czechmate

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A friend brought me her computer and said it will not boot. It's an HP xt926, 128MB RAM, 40 GB HDD, and Windows ME. Restore disks will not restore system. Get error msg saying "Can't write to HDD". Put drive in another computer as a slave and ran Norton 2002, found HTML.Redlof.A Virus on many files (VBS multi threat virus that appears to be blocking access to boot sector and replicates in e-mail). Norton could not repair or delete files but did quarantine them. Could delete from quarantine but that only removes them from the quarantine list and not the drive. Fdisk , format, and Sys do not work. Error returned is "Error writing to HDD". Also tried killfdisk but that didn't work. Ran online scan from Housecall.antivirus.com and it cleaned anumber of the files but several were not cleaned. Need to know an effective method for wiping all files from HDD (including Boot Sector) so I can reformat. Looked for program called Ghost Wipe which is supposed to do that but had no luck finding it.Can anyone help with the problem?

10 replies

by mfischer

Boot to a WinME boot disk and at the command prompt A:\ type Fdisk /MBR This will wipe the MBR... if the virus is particularly resiliant then download the rannish partition manager. You may have to type that in to google to find it.

by czechmate

A:\ fdisk /mbr does not work as the drive is not recognized from DOS. Ranish Partition Manager ran but stopped mid-way through with the error "Error writing to drive C:".

by ann777

What you need is a zero-fill utility -- it fills the hdd with zeros. Look at the site where the hdd was manufactured for these utilities.

fdisk is not a zero-fill/nor a low-level format utility.... but you can try fdisking and actually delete all current partitions and then recreate new ones in changed format. If you had no partitions, then fdisk, create active partition (half the drive), create second partition, format each, then fdisk again and delete both partitions, and create one (if that's the end result you need). Scandisk and make sure the drive itself is okay. Install anti-virus and runa complete scan.

by czechmate

Zero fill utility from drive manufacturer was unable to access sector 0 and failed to overwrite the drive. Fdisk does not work although it appears to. It says the primary partition is deleted and it creates another primary partition then rebuilds the FAT. When you try to format the drive you get "error writing to drive C:". All information that appeared on the drive before the fdisk still appears on the drive. Creating multiple partitions did not work. get the same "error writing to drive c:" message.

by czechmate

Got a "Low level Format" program (Zero Fill Program)and downloaded Ranish Partition Manager. Zero fill program did not work as it needed to be run from DOS and the drive can't be seen in DOS only in windows. Ranish will not write to the HDD.

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