MalWare Won: How to Wipe Drive & Reinstall

[Phil3]

For once, some malware has thwarted every attempt to eliminate it off my PC. Random ads play through the speakers. I am having to resort to wiping the drive and reinstalling Windows XP Home. I do not know how to go about doing this. I would appreciate guidance on how to completely clean the drive, and get Windows back up and running. I built the computer, but had a clean new drive and can not recall how I got Windows installed.

AMD Athlon 64 3500+
ASUS A8V Motherboard
Seagate 74GB Raptor 10,000 rpm drive
Corsair 1 GB memory
ATI Radeon X800 Pro video card
Comcast Internet connection

What security softwares should I be using. I was using the free Norton Security Suite from Comcast, but understand that is not optimal.

Thanks.

- Phil

[sarge1572]

IF you have a Windows XP disc, it will walk you through the re-install. If you DON'T, you'll have to buy it. It's not that expensive. Search for it on line and you'll find it for less than a hundert bucks.

Pretty small HD, in todays systems.

Copy all of your pics and personal files to an external drive, or CD, thumb drive, etc, and scan them BEFORE you copy them so you don't transfer your viruses.

MOST security software is good. I use McAfee, but Norton is good, and many of the others. Buy a subscription and USE IT. I scan my computer HD and external 3 times a week. It takes forever so I do it at night (500 GB HD and 1 TB external). I back up my HD to the external every two weeks.

It's only scary the first time.

If you're a Window's user, which you and I are, you'll need to do this every few years because the external attacks on windows is constant. Just remember, BACK UP YOUR FILES and you'll be OK.

Good luck.

Jeff

[freonr22]

you already did the basics, there are more, but at least, microsoft security essentials, malwarebytes, ccleaner?. these are all free...microsoft techsupport was on the phone with me for 4 hours 1.5 years ago and thats what they had me do. it worked

[Phil3]

Jeff,

Thank you. I tried CCCleaner, SpyBot, AdaWare, MalwareBytes, and Super AntiSpyware, all to no avail. I have the original XP disc w/product activation key. The 74 gig drive is for the operating system and applications. The data will go on an internal 500 gig drive, and backed up to an external 500 gig drive. It is possible that the backed up data is now infected. Wipe that drive too and back up to something that is totally clean?

Not sure how to completely wip the drive clean. Once that is done, just stick in the XP disc and it takes me from there? Anything I need to do in the bios, like ensuring it boots from the CD or...? It is that kind of thing I am unsure about.


- Phil

IF you have a Windows XP disc, it will walk you through the re-install. If you DON'T, you'll have to buy it. It's not that expensive. Search for it on line and you'll find it for less than a hundert bucks.

Pretty small HD, in todays systems.

Copy all of your pics and personal files to an external drive, or CD, thumb drive, etc, and scan them BEFORE you copy them so you don't transfer your viruses.

MOST security software is good. I use McAfee, but Norton is good, and many of the others. Buy a subscription and USE IT. I scan my computer HD and external 3 times a week. It takes forever so I do it at night (500 GB HD and 1 TB external). I back up my HD to the external every two weeks.

It's only scary the first time.

If you're a Window's user, which you and I are, you'll need to do this every few years because the external attacks on windows is constant. Just remember, BACK UP YOUR FILES and you'll be OK.

Good luck.

Jeff

[Etihtsarom]

|Stick the CD in, reboot, enter bios,choose Cd drive as first boot device, and hdd as second device, save settings and reboot.

Now press key to boot from CD, choose to format the drive completely, don't use quick format, then install.

I know of only a couple, very rare, low level rootkits that can survive a reformat. In the unlikely event that that is the case, try using HDDErase to zero the drive before reinstallation.

[pogie45]

For once, some malware has thwarted every attempt to eliminate it off my PC. Random ads play through the speakers. I am having to resort to wiping the drive and reinstalling Windows XP Home...

Before you wipe your hard drive, try system restore to a date before you start having virus\spyware problems if it is available.

Try Microsoft Online scan & free online virus scans. ESET is pretty good.

http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/default.htm

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1TSNA_ENUS424&q=free+online+virus+scan&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=

http://www.eset.com/us/online-scanner

After you are satisfied that your PC is clean, disable system restore, restart & re-enable system restore. This is to clean all your restore points, including ones with the virus, & start fresh.

[alexf2k9]

i just hate it when i get a virus i cant remove,,, makes me want to find the creator and distributor and kick their a**

[G1500]

Pretty small HD, in todays systems.

Its built for speed, not for space. 10K RPM drives are almost twice as fast as most standard laptop drives.

Before you wipe your hard drive, try system restore to a date before you start having virus\spyware problems if it is available.

Try Microsoft Online scan & free online virus scans. ESET is pretty good.

If you have a virus, its not worth trying to restore, you are more than likely going to reformat anyways, you will be happy you did.

If you ask me, ESET is (one of) the best available right now. Yes, they can be pricy, but yes, it is worth it.

[sholling]

The days of cleaning an infected system are over along with the days of malware being written by sexually frustrated teens. Now it's teams of well educated and well paid professional programmers developing malicious software that cannot be reliably removed. Those developers test their creations against the most popular antivirus programs before releasing them into the wild. If it's a free product or one of the big three brands you can be sure that the virus programmer's latest creations can get around them - at least for a few weeks until they develop an update.

As you figured out the best thing to do wipe or replace the hard disk (I'd replace with a 300GB Rapter) and reinstall everything from scratch.

Once you have Windows installed get yourself a subscription to ESET's NOD32. NOD32 runs really well on older machines and is very-very good. Newegg has it on sale regularly or you can download a 30 day free trial from eset while you wait for a sale. The 1st thing you install after Windows is your AV software. I'd also run Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. IE 6 has so many security holes that M$ is begging customers to stop using it. Finally get yourself some drive imaging software so that in the future you can recover in minutes instead of hours.

Other security enhancements that don't cost anything include using a good DNS server (OpenDNS) that will warn if going to untrustworthy sites and using both Ad Block Plus and World Of Trust with Firefox. These are enhancements and not replacements for top notch AV software. Finally stop opening those email attachments and following email links.

[Phil3]

Thanks. Would ESET be good pick if I decided to upgrade the hardware to something not so old? You mentioned ESET NOD32 works really well on "older systems".

I always use Firefox, not IE. Not sure how to go about getting a "good" DNS server. I am not as hi-tech as you.

Do not open e-mail attachments, but do open links, so thanks for that tip.

- Phil

The days of cleaning an infected system are over along with the days of malware being written by sexually frustrated teens. Now it's teams of well educated and well paid professional programmers developing malicious software that cannot be reliably removed. Those developers test their creations against the most popular antivirus programs before releasing them into the wild. If it's a free product or one of the big three brands you can be sure that the virus programmer's latest creations can get around them - at least for a few weeks until they develop an update.

As you figured out the best thing to do wipe or replace the hard disk (I'd replace with a 300GB Rapter) and reinstall everything from scratch.

Once you have Windows installed get yourself a subscription to ESET's NOD32. NOD32 runs really well on older machines and is very-very good. Newegg has it on sale regularly or you can download a 30 day free trial from eset while you wait for a sale. The 1st thing you install after Windows is your AV software. I'd also run Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. IE 6 has so many security holes that M$ is begging customers to stop using it. Finally get yourself some drive imaging software so that in the future you can recover in minutes instead of hours.

Other security enhancements that don't cost anything include using a good DNS server (OpenDNS) that will warn if going to untrustworthy sites and using both Ad Block Plus and World Of Trust with Firefox. These are enhancements and not replacements for top notch AV software. Finally stop opening those email attachments and following email links.

[paul0660]

Comcast's free Norton AV has been very effective, I think, I and I would like to know if the OP saw some warning signs before the system took a dump.

[G1500]

This is what I use: ESET Smart Security.

You're best off getting the free trial, and waiting for it to go on sale. Check newegg too.

[G1500]

http://www.eset.com/us/home/nod32-antivirus

[Ricky-Ray]

Look into Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG Free edition for antivirus software. Both will do a much better job than either McAfee or Norton, requires less computing power and best of all....it's free.

[ldivinag]

give me your HD for a day. lemme clean it.

the reason you cant clean it yourself is that once your machine is running, so is all the bad stuff.

when i do is connect the bad HD to my machine (which i know is clean) and then scan the heck out of it.

so far, i have repaired 3 family machines this way.

if you have another clean machine you can do this yourself. you just need a cool little gadget i found from frys a few years ago. this device allows you to plug any HD (from laptop to desktop, IDE or sata) and turns it into a USB connectible device.

simple...

btw, something like this:

http://www.frys.com/product/5772432?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

but remember, the machine you are connecting to, MUST BE CLEAN.