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Can I get rid of a mystery partition?
I'd been struggling for months to get rid of a malware infection on my Dell XPS 410, I went through the removal drill on 3 different security forums, each time being pronounced clean at the end, and all scans coming up clear -- as they generally had all along. As one forum helper commented, "The symptoms which you describe indicate a significant infection, but I'm not seeing much indication of that in the logs". But the identical problems would always return soon after, even during my several days of total computer "quarantine", the time during which I'd reconnect neither my ethernet cable nor external USB drives, or reinstall any programs.
I ended up buying a new Dell XPS Studio and have at last been again free of these troubles in the month or so since. But wanting still to beat the bugs on the XPS 410 I've kept tinkering with it. I finally noticed something on the 410 when I was running Killdisk on it a couple of days ago. The program shows (besides UBCD showing up as Floppy Drive A) the local partition 80h, which is easily deleted and zero-filled, but unlike any other partition utilities which I've run it also indicates the presence of an 800meg 81h partition (or device) which I've been unable to delete or zero-fill -- trying just gets me locked into a continuous echo of read/write errors. Killdisk always shows the 80h partition with only zero bits all through after it's been run, but the little 81h partition retains its data (whatever it is), formatted in FAT32 (I always format my partitions in NTFS). Even exploring the drive from my Ubuntu installation shows nothing unusual.
A similar partition is not on the new machine, and its presence on the 410 may be just some sort of remnant from the Dell OEM XP Home OS I suppose, from before I tried unsuccessfully to get rid of the problem by installing Windows 7 Premium with a clean install, but it does make me wonder whether this may be where the incredibly persistent bugs may have been residing all this time.
Might this be possible, and any advice on how I could get this partition off the drive?
Thanks,
papilio
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Last edited by papilio; 01 Oct 2010 at 00:18.