hard drive virus

[tali122]

friend of mine had to get a new hard drive as he claims that viruses wouldnt allow him to format his exsisitng hard drive- is it true that some virus' can cause such terminal damage?- i thought the worst case scenario was the format of the h/drive

[j2buttonsw]

I think you are right and your friend is not. You can easily do a low level format using a bootable floppy and a low level formater like maxllf.exe on most (if not all) IDE drives whether they are infected with a virus or not.

[lebesset]

tell him to throw the old drive your way ! go to the DBAN site , get the free programme , make the floppy and NUKE away

[boobesque]

if there is a virus on the hard drive then formatting the drive will erase the virus anyway. occasionally, corrupt sectors can prevent a successful format if you are using 3rd party software such as partition magic. if this is the case then you should, as j2buttonsw suggested, do a low level format (also known as writing zero's to the drive). this takes a long time but completely blanks the drive without fail (unless you have dropped it one to many times causing internal damage). go to the drive manufacturers website to download a low level format program. if you have already tried and failed at this hjen there is internal damage to the drive, not caused by a virus.