Main Forum > General Computer Support

Cannot get access to the internet

<< < (24/29) > >>

Shane:
With the amount of programs that are installed, that have been uninstalled and other problems even the repair install of windows failed, repeatedly. Each error it would give I would give him a way to fix and continue on. The repair install got all the way to installing the files and then failed yet again.

A fresh install is very much needed.

Shane

Boggin:
A repair install doesn't always work on an OEM machine - it certainly doesn't on my Toshiba.

I've tried this a couple of times and it seems to get almost to the end and at exactly the same spot, it fails and then you have to sit through while it restores the original version.

If you wipe the HDD then you will wipe the Recovery Partition and you will have a computer without an OS.

If you have back ups of what is on the computer then follow the steps in the link in Post #111 to factory reset it.

rhuffman:
Was talking to a local tech from a very good computer shop here in my town and he told me that some virus can hide on the drive even when you wipe the drive, they hid in a hidden part of the drive (something like a double partition or something. He suggested i remove my drive from my pc and attach it to a usb connector and plug it into my MAC and wipe and partition it with the mac thereby nullifying the virus that may be on the hard drive, different file system than the PC and then after that put it back into the pc and do the install of windows and it will ask you to partition and format it to NTFS. He said if i wipe it on the pc and re-partition it and format that there is a possibly of the virus still be able to hide on the drive and after doing the re-partition and format it reactivates itself. Sounds strange! But god who knows.

Boggin:
I suppose you could do that but see how you get on by factory resetting it with the OEM Recovery disks or factory resetting it from within the Windows Recovery Environment (WRE).

An alternative is to scan with MBAR.

While this article pre-dates the final release of MBAR, it will walk you through the procedure to scan your full system and could be less painful to do than the work involved in either removing the HDD or a factory reset. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/how-to-use-malwarebytes-anti-rootkit

Shane:
That would be a Master Boot Record type of virus. Formatting the drive wouldn't wipe it, BUT destroying the partitions and recreating them would as a new MBR is written when you do that. No need to hook it up to a mac.

I do it with every install of Windows 7 i do. When the install gets to the point of the hard drive and where to install it, I delete every partition there is and just leave one big partition. Not only is the file system destroyed but the MBR is destroyed and recreated as well.


--- Quote ---The MBR holds the information on how the logical partitions, containing file systems, are organized on that medium. Besides that, the MBR also contains executable code to function as a loader for the installed operating system—usually by passing control over to the loader's second stage, or in conjunction with each partition's volume boot record (VBR). This MBR code is usually referred to as a boot loader.
--- End quote ---

This is why when you destroy the partitions and create new ones the MBR gets written again, when you simply only do a format, the partitions do not change so the MBR doesnt need to be written to, so if there was a virus on the MBR then it would still be there after a format, this is why a format doesnt work.

But taking the steps of hooking the drive into a mac is not needed at all :wink:

Shane

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page