Virus

As long as you don't insert an infected floppy disk into the hard drive in question, you can't get a virus.

If the suspect hard drive has a boot sector virus, and you boot from either hard drive, then yes it is possible.

The safe way to deal with a "suspect" hard drive is to have the BIOS virus check set to enable, and only the suspect hard drive on the system.

Then, boot from a write protected (you can also enable write protect in some BIOSs) boot floppy.

Run fdisk, and delete all partitions, and the Master Boot Record.

Then re-boot, and run fdisk again to set up the partitions that you desire.

Chas

Yes it is possible. Master Boot Record viruses can get you and will survive the formatting (as they have infected the MBR).

Boot from a write protected floppy with your disk tools (Fdisk, format, etc). The FDISK /MBR command is what you need to clear the Master Boot Record. Then you can format and use the drive safely.

If the utility files have a virus, that you are using to format, then yes. Typically, though, if you have a "clean" set of utility files, reformatting a hard drive should be clean. If you still have problems, check hardware issues.

If you DO NOT boot from the infected drive, OR access it in anyway the answer is NO.

Once you have installed the drive into your system, boot from a virus free system disk or from the virus clean C: drive.

Run FDISK on the infected hard drive.

You will now be able to access the drive to format it with no fear.

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