Formatt xp hard drive

IvanOpinion

Bonecracker wrote:

Sounds like someones been googling to me.

Usually a low level format should only ever be performed as a last resort because you can actually ruin the FAT and have major problems on a reinstall.

Never thought to google ... have now and the old memory is still working well. Those were the days when you actually fixed computers not get the local 8-year old to replace a board.

The concept of a proper low level format is to totally wipe the disk from all recorded data including the FAT and was generally applied at the factory (hence the BIOS call) ... I think it actually totally rebuilt the sector information (there is no modern equivalent for IDE drives). On the old Zenith Z100, Act Sirius and IBM PC systems I used to work with it would take hours to run and that was on a 10Mb hard disk. You then put the paritition table back on (it wasn't fdisk then .. possibly 'fxprep') and then you did a high level format that built the file allocation table. You were guaranteed a completely clean system.

There are utilities out there but most people simply do a 'format' which does very little except clear out the FAT(s). All the data remains on the disk drive and is recoverable .. some viruses use this.

Ivan

Bonecracker

IvanOpinion wrote:

There are utilities out there but most people simply do a 'format' which does very little except clear out the FAT(s).

What about NTFS'esses (that may not be a real word.)

IvanOpinion

Bonecracker wrote:

What about NTFS'esses (that may not be a real word.)

Sounds like a breed of Amazonian women to me

Even after a format you can still recover data from an NTFS partition

Ivan

dan2002

hi look we all seem to be getting off the point, I used KILLDISK to reformat the harddrive and it did state that no data can be recovered ,seems to be like cyberscrub, I would like someone to do a search on KILLDISK to see if I did the right thing because I am sure there are other people out there who has the same problem as I did and dont know what to do ,as I said before this was very easy to use so long as you have an xp disk to put windows back on the computer ,yes you lose everything on the computer but you do get a new computer back without the problems

Bonecracker

IvanOpinion wrote:

Even after a format you can still recover data from an NTFS partition

Yes I know thats why I use D-Ban.

For Dan2002

I would not of used killdisk because that could of given you problems if you have a restore partition as it may have deleted the restore files within that partition this is ofcourse if the PC has a fresh copy of XP put on via ghosting because when you ghost the PC the XP disc will look at your PCs restore files to start the ghosting process.

If the PC does not use the ghosting process then you may well be ok, just remember when ghosting a PC that will usually pre format the PC anyway so that you only have one copy on your machine, this is also true however when doing a manual install of XP you will be asked if you would like to perform a format either Quick or Normal format, thus I am sure you didnt have to use a disk utillity to format XP in the beginning.

Thing is as mentioned before I think this was dire overkill to format the PC because of a virus, you would of been better off using another route (antivirus) or an online scanner, this may of taken a few times to do or to suss what was wrong, In my opinion you cracked a walnut with a sledgehammer, but its done and thats the result you wanted.

alandoc

Ouch! That is a nasty one to try and remove. Best advice seems to be to use Hijack This, see: http://www.tomcoyote.org/hjt/.

Sorry, I am not an expert on HJT but there are plenty of other forums whre you can get help.

Good luck.