Formatting and virus removal help?

Hey there,

If I wipe my hard drive completely before installing a fresh version of Windows, am I 100% guaranteed to kill off every single virus, malware strain, and hidden copy lurking in the system?

Aaron Chavez8 said:Hey there,

If I wipe my hard drive completely before installing a fresh version of Windows, am I 100% guaranteed to kill off every single virus, malware strain, and hidden copy lurking in the system?

Not necessarily, though it's close. I suppose you could still run into viruses that manage to embed themselves directly into the BIOS or the MBR. However, those kinds of threats haven't really been a major thing for at least the last 20 years, and even back when they were more common, they were incredibly rare. So, in most practical cases, I'd say formatting should pretty much solve all your virus concerns!

In 99.9% of cases, yeah.

Kenneth Cruz67 said:Not necessarily, though it's close. I suppose you could still run into viruses that manage to embed themselves directly into the BIOS or the MBR. However, those kinds of threats haven't really been a major thing for at least the last 20 years, and even back when they were more common, they were incredibly rare. So, in most practical cases, I'd say formatting should pretty much solve all your virus concerns!

👍 There used to be cases where people would actually pull the processor right out of the motherboard, but those instances were absolute anomalies, and after running all the diagnostics, they’d eventually realize the hardware was fine and they just didn't know what they were doing.

Back then, even some legitimate Windows processes were being flagged as viruses.

Aaron Chavez8 said:Hey there,

If I wipe my hard drive completely before installing a fresh version of Windows, am I 100% guaranteed to kill off every single virus, malware strain, and hidden copy lurking in the system?

Personally, I have never encountered a situation where formatting failed to clear out everything living on the drive. By the way, why the panic? Which version of Windows are you running? 🙂

I don't know, I think I've been using Norton since 2002 if I recall correctly, and as far as actual viruses go, I haven't had to worry about them from that point until today.

Man, I dealt with this kind of thing maybe ten years ago. Some nasty virus managed to wedge itself right into the MBR, so even after a full Windows reinstall, it would just pop back up a few hours later...

fadedorca66 said:Man, I dealt with this kind of thing maybe ten years ago. Some nasty virus managed to wedge itself right into the MBR, so even after a full Windows reinstall, it would just pop back up a few hours later...

It’s just not working.

Using an external drive to format everything wipes the whole slate clean, starting with the IBM.

Unless, of course, the actual boot process in the BIOS has been totally compromised.